The following is a version of a press release I wrote and sent out on behalf of the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched in November with the activist Joanne MacInnes. The photo to the left, of campaigners about to set off from Runnymede to Parliament yesterday on a three-day Relay for Rights, shows, at the back, Chris Grayling, the Lord Chancellor, as King John. The first non-legal appointee to the job, he is to be publicly criticised at the Global Law Summit by Tony Cross, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, who told the Independent, “I’m going to talk about how successive governments have treated public law with contempt, certainly over the last 20 years.”

Giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer to visit Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre to protest about hypocrisy of corporate Magna Carta celebration while Shaker is still denied habeas corpus at Guantánamo.

At 1pm on Monday 23 February, Andy Worthington and Joanne MacInnes, the directors of We Stand With Shaker, the campaign calling for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, will be joining lawyers at Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament, for Not the Global Law Summit, an event put together by the Justice Alliance.

The Justice Alliance is a lawyers’ organisation campaigning to defend legal aid from savage cuts imposed by the government, and Not the Global Law Summit is the culmination of Relay for Rights, a three-day march from Runnymede to protest about the hypocrisy of the Global Law Summit, taking place from 23-25 February at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre. While purporting to mark the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, the summit, at which tickets cost £1500 a head, is actually an international corporate sham, described by the journalist Peter Oborne as “sordid, disgusting and debased.” Read the rest of this entry »