LGC Newsletter – July 2023

Guantánamo Bay

 

Yemeni prisoner Al Hamza Al-Bahlul, 53, the only prisoner serving a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay, had an appeal turned down by a federal appeals court to have his life sentence “for conspiring to commit war crimes as a propaganda chief for Al Qaeda and an aide to Osama bin Laden” reconsidered by a new military jury. His case has already been appealed several times with earlier appeals striking “down two of the three crimes for which Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted in 2008. His lawyer, Michel Paradis, had argued that a new sentencing jury should be assembled at the base to hear evidence and arguments on whether his remaining conspiracy conviction deserved a lesser sentence. Mr. Paradis also sought reconsideration of the sentence because, a year after Mr. Bahlul’s trial, Guantánamo’s military commission system was overhauled to explicitly prohibit the use of evidence “obtained by the use of torture or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the sentence should stand and that the prisoner’s lawyers brought up the question of torture too late in the appellate process”.

“Mr. Bahlul’s legal team is likely to seek full appellate court review before deciding whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. This is Mr. Bahlul’s sixth case before the civilian appeals court, including one in 2014 that overturned two other convictions on charges of providing material support for terrorism and solicitation of others to commit war crimes.” He is the only prisoner still at Guantánamo whose case was heard during George W. Bush’s administration.

“A United Nations human rights investigator who visited the prison this year mentioned Mr. Bahlul in a report that condemned conditions of the detention operation. As the only convict at the prison, he is kept “in isolation, raising serious concerns of solitary confinement in contravention of international law,” according to the report by Fionnuala Ni Aolain, who is serving as the U.N. special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights. Ms. Ni Aolain said a prison policy letting him socialize with other detainees four hours a day has been implemented inconsistently and arbitrarily.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/us/guantanamo-al-qaeda-recruiter.html

 

Pre-trial hearings set to be heard in July and August in three cases (Al-Nashiri (USS Cole bombing), the Bali bombing case and Nashwan Al-Tamer (Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi)) have been cancelled. In the Bali bombing case, a new judge, Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Braun from the US Air Force, will hear the case when pre-trial hearings are resumed, scheduled now for October. In Nashwan Al-Tamer’s case, he was one of five prisoners who reported to have contracted Covid-19 in July. The US military said that the illness was not serious in any of the cases.