News that four UK residents are to be released from Guantanamo Bay is welcome, but also raises a host of unanswered questions. The sudden turn-around for these men seems to have come as a result of a policy switch by the British government.
In August the UK stood its previous position of refusing to intercede for non-Britons at Guantanamo (“no consular responsibility”) on its head.
The US says it wants to close the camp, British ministers noted, so we will assist them. Foreign nationals with a history of UK residency would now be the focus of UK lobbying.
At Amnesty International we welcomed the government’s new stance (rather different from fighting prisoners’ families in the courts as it had done previously). The negotiations appear to have borne fruit, but where does this actually leave things? It’s far from clear.
Of the four men now expected to be brought out of US Camp Delta, only one — north London resident Jamil El-Banna — had previously been “cleared” for release by prison authorities.
The others — Omar Degayes, Abdennour Samuer and Shaker Aamer — were still languishing in Guantanamo’s notorious legal limbo. News of their release, though equally welcome, was less expected. But what about a fifth UK resident, Binyam Mohammed, who was also part of the government’s intended lobbying effort?
This is a man whose treatment prior to imprisonment at Guantanamo is believed to have included “rendition” by American agents to Morocco and torture at the hands of his Moroccan jailers.
Binyam Mohammed’s omission from last week’s release announcement is therefore deeply troubling.
Does it mean Binyam Mohammed is still going to face a “military commission” (a bogus trial conducted wholly by the US department of defense that can rely on secret “evidence” that may have been extracted from torture)?
Meanwhile, does he face years of unchallengeable imprisonment beforehand?
This is what the UK government urgently needs to ascertain.
And a “sixth” man is also of concern. Ahmed Belbacha, another former UK resident, was not even part of the government’s August lobbying effort and is once again absent from recent developments.
We need to hear from ministers over what the UK intends to do about the continuing detention of both Mohammed and Belbacha.
On top of the fate of UK residents, there of course remains the wider question of what will happen to the 300 other men at Guantanamo.
Last week a fresh case before the US supreme court set out to test the lawfulness of holding “enemy combatants” outside the reach of the American legal system.
If the court rules, as I firmly believe it should, that the US administration has breached its own laws in denying prisoners access to the American courts, this could, finally, after six torrid years, mark the beginning of the end of Guantanamo.
Guantanamo has always been a travesty of justice and, as former prisoner Moazzam Begg has said recently, some of the abuses carried out there should themselves lead to investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators — of the guards, of members of the notoriously violent Emergency Reaction Force, and of camp officials who have either turned a blind eye or even authorized abuse.
Meanwhile, when commentators take up the highly questionable American government line that a handful of men earmarked for release from Guantanamo are still “dangerous” (on what evidence?
If it exists why were they never put on trial?), it obscures the incontrovertible injustice of Guantanamo itself.
As a thoroughly dangerous experiment with justice, the Guantanamo “war on terror” military prison has caused harm to hundreds of its inmates as well as immeasurable damage to America’s human rights reputation.
Neither 28 nor 42 days of pre-charge detention, it has cast prisoners into the outer darkness of indefinite pre-charge detention periods.
It was always off the scale compared to all international measures of due process and its time for it to end.
