Monday, January 31, 2022

LGC Newsletter – January 2022


Guantánamo Bay

The periodic review board has cleared five prisoners for release, although this does not mean they are likely to leave Guantánamo Bay in the near future. The number of prisoners now cleared for release, from among the 39 remaining after 20 years of arbitrary detention, is 18. A further 9 prisoners face no charges or trial and are held as “forever prisoners”. The five men are: Somali Guleed Hassan Ahmed (also called Guled Hassan Duran); Kenyan Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu; and Omar Muhammad Ali al-Rammah, Moath Hamza al-Alwi, and Suhayl al-Sharabi from Yemen. Somali Guleed Hassan Ahmed is the first prisoner who was previously held and tortured at secret CIA sites and alleged to be a “high-value” (or most tortured) detainee by the US military to be cleared for release.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/12/us-approves-release-five-more-guantanamo-detainees

 

In a rare and strongly-worded statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has had rare access to the prisoners almost since Guantánamo opened in January 2022, called for the release of the remaining prisoners. To mark the 20th anniversary of this engagement on 18 January, the ICRC put out the following statement calling on the US authorities to close the prison and release the prisoners: “The ICRC is gravely concerned that the remaining people held at Guantanamo Bay have been behind bars for so many years with little or no clarity as to what will happen to them. The ICRC notes that some detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay today despite the fact they were deemed eligible for transfer more than ten years ago.

“The detainees deemed eligible by the US government should be transferred today," said Patrick Hamilton, the ICRC's head of delegation in the United States and Canada. "After 20 years and well over 100 visits, we see that the more time passes for these detainees, the more they and their families suffer. The humanitarian rationale for enabling those to leave who are cleared to do so is obvious, and all the more so for those whose departures have been delayed for so long.”

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/icrc-calls-transfers-eligible-guantanamo-detainees

 

A February hearing into the case of Abd Al-Nashiri, accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in 2000, has been adjourned due to the “heightened risk of Covid” at Guantánamo at present. The next scheduled hearing is due to take place from 28 February in the case of an Indonesian and two Malaysian prisoners accused of involvement in the Bali bombing in 2002. The three were arraigned in August 2021 but problems arose with the interpreters whom the defendants could not understand and who were accused of bias, thus they did not enter a plea at the time. A report into the case has shown that the military judge, Commander  Hayes C. Larsen, agrees with the defendants that the interpreters were biased and has given the government until February to find adequate and security-cleared interpreters for the case to proceed, with two for each language (Malay and Indonesian), and has ordered the government to analyse the problems with the Malay interpreting at the August 2021 hearing.

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2022/01/26/report-guantanamo-bay-terror-trial-judge-agrees-with-two-malaysians-asserti/2037658