Moazzam Begg

The following article, originally published on Cageprisoners, is Moazzam Begg’s first detailed response to the campaign directed at his relationship (and that of Cageprisoners) with Amnesty International, which I reported in an article entitled, “Defending Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International.” I am pleased to be cross-posting it here, and hope that readers pay attention to […]

It was a full house yesterday evening at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London, for a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” directed by Polly Nash and myself. I’m glad to report that the film was very well received, and was followed by an excellent Q&A session with myself and former […]

As part of the Times’ and Sunday Times’ ongoing witch-hunt of former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners (the organization of which he is the director), Margarette Driscoll wrote an uncritical article on Sunday about Gita Sahgal, the head of Amnesty’s Gender Unit, who started the ball rolling by badmouthing her employer to the Sunday […]

This evening, Amnesty International is screening “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the new documentary, directed by Polly Nash and myself, which tells the story of the Bush administration’s despicable post-9/11 flight from the law through interviews with former prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Tom Wilner, and myself.  The […]

In response to the hysteria regarding Amnesty International’s association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners (which I reported in detail here), another former prisoner, Bisher al-Rawi, has written the following letter to the Times, which I found to be eloquent, understated and unerringly accurate about the role of Amnesty in providing hope to […]

Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed […]

The news that Ziyad Ali Hashem, a control order detainee in the UK (previously identified only as DD) has had his control order lifted elicits two particular responses from those who have been aware of his case since he was first deprived of his liberty in November 2005: firstly, relief that his ordeal is at […]

On October 21, at the launch of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington) at the Cochrane Theatre in London, Spectacle, the production company, filmed the Q&A session following the screening, in which Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash took questions from […]

Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of prisoners still held at Guantánamo, won a court victory last Tuesday, in the case of the British resident Shaker Aamer, which appears to draw on the organization’s success in securing a judicial review in the case of another of their clients, Binyam Mohamed. Initiated in […]

Those of us who have been aware that the principles of open justice in the UK are being threatened in an unprecedented manner have, to date, focused largely on the use of secret evidence in cases related to terrorism — widely ignored by the general public, and by much of the media — and on […]