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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

The wheels of justice may grind slowly in the US court system, for reasons that involve various forms of inefficiency, but also the requirement to conduct detailed research into legal precedents. Nevertheless, throughout the Republic’s 249-year history, the courts have repeatedly, if, at times, in a glacial manner, performed a key role in ensuring that the checks and balances in the Constitution — the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government — are enforced.

On December 5, ten months after a particularly noxious example of executive overreach began — the detention of migrants with final deportation orders from the US in detention facilities on the grounds of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a judge in the District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s policy of holding migrants at Guantánamo was both “impermissibly punitive”, as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and was also completely unauthorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The ruling came in a class action lawsuit, Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, that had first been submitted in June by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals who were held at Guantánamo at the time, but also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class”; namely, “all immigration detainees originally apprehended and detained in the United States, and who are, or will be held at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

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In a lawsuit submitted to the District Court in Washington, D.C. on Saturday (March 1), the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) asked the Court to urgently intervene to “put a stop” to what they accurately describe as the Trump administration’s “cruel, unnecessary, and illegal transfers” of migrants to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As the groups explained in a press release, transferring migrants to Guantánamo from the US mainland is a policy “without any legal authority, in violation of federal law and the US Constitution.”

The central premise of the lawsuit is that, although foreign nationals have been held at Guantánamo before — in a Migrant Operations Center established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, and, most notoriously, in the “war on terror” prison established in January 2002, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness — the foreign nationals being sent to Guantánamo by Donald Trump have legal and constitutional rights that cannot be wished away through the traditional subterfuge of pretending that US law doesn’t apply at Guantánamo because, technically, it is only leased from the Cuban government, which has ultimate sovereignty.

In relation to the Migrant Operations Center and the “war on terror” prison, this subterfuge has, shamefully, been largely successful, but, as the rights groups argue compellingly in their lawsuit, because the current migrants have been previously held on the US mainland, even though their asylum claims were ultimately unsuccessful, and they have all been subjected to “final removal” orders, they are still protected by the US Constitution, and by US law; specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.

Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.

Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.

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So there was good news on Wednesday, as the Stansted 15 — activists who prevented a deportation flight from leaving Stansted Airport for west Africa in March 2017 — avoided jail. Three received suspended sentences (with two also receiving 250 hours of community service, with 100 hours for the third), eleven others were given 100 hours of community service, while the 15th “received a 12-month community order with 20 days of rehabilitation”, as the Guardian described it.

However, two troubling aspects of the story remain significant. The first is that the protestors were convicted on charges of terrorism, and, alarmingly, that conviction still stands. As Ash Sardar wrote for the Independent, “Rather than being convicted of aggravated trespass, as other protesters who committed similar offences had been in 2016, the Stansted 15 had an initial trespass charge changed four months into their bail to a charge of ‘endangering safety at aerodromes’ – a scheduled terrorist offence, which potentially carries a life sentence.” The 2016 protest, at Heathrow Airport, against proposals for the airport’s expansion, involved three protestors who were part of the later actions at Stansted — the three who received the suspended sentences. 

Continuing with her analysis of the sentencing in the Independent, Ash Sardar added, “This particular bit of legislation – from the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990, if anyone’s interested – was brought in after the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. Its application in a protest case is completely unprecedented in English courts. You might not agree with the actions of the Stansted 15, but this punitive and misguided use of legislation to criminalise protesters should have you worried regardless.” Read the rest of this entry »

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As someone who has spent the last 13 years working to end imprisonment without charge or trial at Guantánamo, it has always been chilling to see these institutional crimes echoed in the UK. Under Tony Blair, foreign-born, alleged terror suspects were held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence, while other foreign nationals, and British nationals too, also regarded as terror suspects, were subjected to a form of house arrest, also on the basis of secret evidence, under what were known as “control orders.”

Unfortunately, throughout this period, the use of immigration detention was also on the rise. As the Guardian explained in an article in October based on a survey of its history, “The power to detain was created in the 1971 Immigration Act – however, it was not until the Labour government under Tony Blair that the detention estate expanded to become what it is today. In 2000, detention centres could hold 475 people, with another 200 or so held under immigration powers in prisons. Capacity has now expanded to about 3,500 spaces.”

The Guardian article noted that “[m]ore than 27,000 people were detained in 2017, according to the most recent figures”, adding, “Detention is now a significant part of the UK’s immigration enforcement efforts, but locking up immigrants without a time limit is a relatively recent phenomenon.” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

June 26 is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, and today marks its 20th anniversary. When it first took place in 1998, the date was chosen because it is a particularly significant day in the field of human rights. Eleven years previously, on June 26, 1987, the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the UN Convention Against Torture), an enormous breakthrough in the global moral struggle against the use of torture, came into effect, and June 26 also marks the date in 1945 when the UN Charter, the founding document of the United Nations, was signed by 50 of the 51 original member countries (Poland signed it two months later).

The establishment of the UN and of key pledges regarding human rights has been a high point for the aspiration for a better world, which, of course, came about as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. After the UN was founded, the next major milestone in this quest was the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, and in 1950, in a similar vein, the newly formed Council of Europe established the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (originally known as the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms), which entered into force on September 3, 1953.

Unfortunately, although aspirations for a better world are profoundly worthwhile, they constantly jostle with the political realities of a world in which the thirst for power, paranoia, nationalism and capitalism seek to undermine them. Nevertheless, they constantly provide a benchmark for higher human ideals, and it is always reassuring when human rights are prominently observed. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last week, I was delighted to talk to Linda Olson-Osterlund for the morning show, Political Perspectives, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been talking to me about Guantánamo for many years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her. 

The show is available here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Unfortunately, KBOO had a new telephone system, which didn’t allow foreign calls, and so the first 12 minutes of the show feature some music by Bill Frissell, before Linda introduced me at 12:20, prior to our interview beginning at 15:00.

Linda and I spent the first ten minutes talking about the habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyers for eleven of the remaining 41 prisoners at Guantánamo on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. As I explained in a recent article, the lawyers argued, as a press release by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights put it, that “[Donald] Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’” Read the rest of this entry »