Mansour al-Omari is a Syrian human rights defender and legal researcher. He holds an LLM in Transitional Justice and Conflict. Al-Omari works with international and Syrian human rights organisations to hold the perpetrators of international crimes in Syria accountable. In 2012, al-Omari was detained and tortured by the Syrian government for 356 days for documenting its atrocities while working with the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression as the supervisor of the Detainees Office.   CJLPA : Good afternoon, Mansour al-Omari. It is an honour to have the chance to interview you for The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art . You have been a polarising figure in your work defending the human rights of all Syrians around the world for the last few decades.   Mansour al-Omari :   I appreciate your description of me as a polarising figure, as long as you mean that the two polarised divisions are the ones who support human rights and justice for all regardless of irrelevant considerations such as political, tribal, racial, or sectarian affiliations; and those who deny human rights and justice for all. CJLPA : When you first began working as a journalist, can you please describe the challenges you faced having to adhere to censorship by the Syrian government?

Introduction[1]   Why have Palestinian Bedouin youth in the Jerusalem periphery disappeared? This has been a consistent question in the minds of researchers working with Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic (AQHRC). The AQHRC has been working with Palestinian Bedouin communities in the southeast Jerusalem periphery since 2014. These communities are among the most vulnerable communities to Israeli settler colonialism in all of its components; land expropriation, displacement, and imposition of an apartheid system, as will be demonstrated shortly. Over the past ten years, despite making concerted and consistent engagement with these communities, AQHRC has failed in engaging young men in the vast majority of activities, including research, advocacy, and awareness-raising workshops, to name a few.   This observation was corroborated while interviewing a 37-year-old Bedouin man in a Bedouin community near Jerusalem. The field research team of AQHRC asked him about the whereabouts of young Bedouin men, and his response was: ‘we rarely see them as well…if it is a wedding, or a social event you will see 300 young men but otherwise you will barely see one of them, it is like they have just ‘disappeared’ as if they rode a donkey or a car and went deep into the desert’.[2] This statement on its own gave rise to several other questions. Why would the Bedouin young men appear in weddings or social events and not in political activities? Why are they absent from the public sphere and the political arena of their communities despite the imminent threat of eviction and demolition of their homes by the Israeli authorities? How can this alternating surfacing of young men be explained?

Gaza: Can Anyone Hear Us?[1]   In a Washington Post  article published on 16 December 2023, the reporter David Ignatius wrote:   For three days this past week, I traveled the West Bank, from the arid hills below Hebron in the south to the chalky heights of Nablus in the north. What I saw was a pattern of Israeli domination and occasional abuse that makes daily life a humiliation for many Palestinians—and could obstruct the peaceful future that Israelis and Palestinians both say they want.  Driving the roads of the West Bank is—forgive the term—a ‘two-plate’ solution. Israeli settlers with yellow license plates zoom along on a well-guarded superhighway called Route 60. Palestinians with white plates navigate small, bumpy roads. Since Oct. 7, many of the entrances to their villages have often been closed. Traveling in an Israeli taxi with a Palestinian driver, I saw some of both worlds.  I watched backups at Israeli checkpoints near Bethlehem and Nablus that were over a half-mile long and could require waits of more than two hours. The delays, indignities and outright assaults on Palestinians have become a grim routine. ‘If I’m in a yellow-plate car, does that change my blood?’ asked Samer Shalabi, the Palestinian who was my guide in the Nablus area.  My tour of the West Bank was a reality check about what’s possible ‘the day after’ the Gaza war ends. President Biden and other world leaders speak hopefully about creating a Palestinian state once Hamas is defeated. I’d love to see that happen, too. But people need to get real about the obstacles that are in front of our eyes.[2]

As a result of systematic attacks by the Russian armed forces on Ukrainian cities, civilians are killed and injured, and civilian objects are destroyed. Amidst these attacks, museums and architectural monuments protect valuable objects. The destruction and expropriation of Ukraine’s cultural property by the Russian aggressor is striking in its scope. These actions have reached such an extent that we can consider it the destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. At the opening of the Ukrainian Institute’s ‘Postcards from Ukraine’ project, the director of the USAID Mission in Ukraine, James Hope, noted that ‘Russia’s malicious, targeted destruction of Ukrainian Cultural Monuments is a huge loss for Ukraine, Europe, and the whole world. Trying to erase the culture and history of Ukraine, the Kremlin is trying to erase the very concept of the Ukrainian nation’.[1]   Architectural monuments and objects of monumental art, monuments, religious sites, and places of memory are subject to targeted attacks. Among other things, a significant number of crimes committed during Russia’s aggression against Ukraine are directed against museums and museum collections, which are a concentrated embodiment of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. At the same time, museums of both state, municipal and private ownership suffer losses. The intangible cultural heritage of Ukraine also suffers significant losses. This heritage has the least protection in International Humanitarian Law, but it is the reflection and carrier of the national cultural traditions of any nation. The project ‘War Crimes in Ukraine: Museums and Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Crosshairs’, implemented by the NGO Fundamental Research Support Fund, documented the damage, destruction, and looting of a significant number of museums in Ukraine (100), resulting in a report of the same name.[2]

Thomas B Wilner is the managing partner of Shearman & Sterling's International Trade and Global Relations Practice. In addition to this, Tom was one of the few lawyers who spoke out against the miscarriages of justice occurring at Guantanamo Bay and fought for the protection of the fundamental constitutional rights of detainees there. He was involved in landmark US Supreme Court cases, including Rasul v. Bush, Boumediene v. Bush, and Al Odah v. United States. To date, Tom continues to fight for justice and the rule of law, defending Khalid Qassim who is still being held without charge at Guantanamo Bay. CJLPA : Welcome Mr Thomas Wilner. Thank you very much for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art to discuss your remarkable work in representing Guantanamo Bay detainees and leading landmarking cases before the US Supreme Court to fight for their release. We would like to begin by asking you how you got involved and why you decided to take on the cases representing the Kuwaiti detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Thomas Wilner : I first became aware of Guantanamo shortly after it opened in January 2002. Of course, at this point, the world had not known the truth about Guantanamo. In our eyes, it consisted of prisoners, factually known to be terrorists and responsible for 9/11. In March 2002, I was contacted by a headhunter in Washington on behalf of twelve Kuwaiti families, to see if I would be interested in representing them. I was told they didn’t even know where their kids were. I then went to Kuwait with Kristine Huskey and, while we were there, the US government told the Kuwait government that eight Kuwaitis were at Guantanamo. The Red Cross then informed Kuwait that the other four were there as well. When we met with the families, they had prepared files on the backgrounds of their kids, many of whom had a long history of going to different Muslim countries to do charitable work. Somebody at that time had called in from Pakistan, and said that three or four of these kids were sold for bounties—they were selling Arabs for bounties. It was the first time I had heard about the bounties. I obtained a copy of a bounty leaflet, which was distributed by the United States in the area. We had included it with our Supreme Court brief both times. It said, ‘ Feed your family for life. Turn in an Arab terrorist ’, and we found out they were paying between $5,000 and $25,000 dollars for ‘Arab terrorists’. CJLPA : What was the experience like, meeting the families in Kuwait especially, after having believed that the US Government were capturing dangerous terrorists, when actually the first Arabs spotted at the wrong place and the wrong time (their children) were sold for bounties? TW : I’ll tell you about one of the most moving experiences of my life, as a lawyer. The father of one of the detainees, Khalid Al-Odah—let me say a little bit about him. Khalid was a pilot, a colonel in the Kuwaiti Air Force, and trained in the United States. In fact, during the last Gulf War—he was out of the Air Force, he had retired—he was an underground fighter with the United States against Saddam Hussein. He looked at me in the room and he said: ‘You know, Tom, my whole life I have wanted us to be like the United States and to follow the principles of the United States. For four months I have tried to just have a meeting so my son, Fawzi, can get simple justice’, and he started to cry. He said: ‘I had lost faith in the United States, and, Tom, you restored my faith in the United States’. This was towards the end of April 2002. CJLPA : What happened next? TW : We came back to the US and drafted and filed a complaint in District Court. The Center for Constitutional Rights’ complaint had been a straight habeas corpus complaint, asking for immediate release. We thought it was wiser to file a normal civil action suit asking for basic due process rights—the right, first, to have lawyers; to have contact with families; and for a fair hearing. That relied on habeas corpus, the essence of which is a fair hearing before an independent tribunal. It is important to understand that hearings are particularly important for the people detained at Guantanamo. None of these people were captured on a battlefield, and they weren't wearing enemy uniforms. They were all dressed as civilians and, in fact, many were simply innocent civilians turned in for bounties or taken by mistake. You need a hearing to see if there was a reasonable basis for detaining them—to distinguish the bad guys from the innocent men detained by mistake. In fact, the Geneva Conventions and our own military regulations require that a hearing be conducted right in the field if there is any question about whether the person should be detained. The military conducted those hearings in the first Gulf War and, on the basis of them, released the large majority of the people it initially detained. We understand that the military wanted to hold those hearings in the Afghan conflict, but the Bush White House refused to do so. As a result, every Arab sold into captivity was simply assumed to be a bad guy and shipped off to Guantanamo without a hearing. CJLPA : Which case did you file first? TW : The CCR case was Rasul v. Bush . Ours was Al Odah v. United States . They were combined but for the Supreme Court, we put Rasul first. People refer to it by the first name. The Rasul case was two Brits and two Australians, a very sympathetic sort of people, our closest allies. For the Court’s perception, you weren’t talking about Arab nations—you were talking about Britain. That was the strategic reason for Rasul to go first. CJLPA : Can you discuss your legal strategy in this case? TW : From the beginning, we saw our strategy as multi-pronged. We wanted a fair day for these guys in court, but I really did not think that the court tactic was the solution because it would take so long and would be hard-fought. Initially, I thought what we were fighting for was just this basic American principle that everyone has a right to defend themselves and that you cannot throw somebody in prison without giving them a fair hearing. So instead, I thought other avenues could help change the government’s minds. I thought we’d pressure the US government diplomatically on behalf of the Kuwaitis and, hopefully, other countries would also apply pressure for their citizens. I also thought that Europe would apply pressure because it was a fundamental breach of human rights. Finally, I thought that the press would be trying to teach people that there was reason to doubt that these were all ‘bad guys’, and the essential right to a hearing was at stake. CJLPA : Did any of these avenues work? TW : I’ll deal with the diplomatic aspect to start with because, in a way, it is the simplest and most short-lived. The government of Kuwait has fabulous ambassadors. They were told and assured by the US government that: ‘These men at Guantanamo are bad men. Stay away’. They would feed them this information and make it very difficult for the Kuwait government. So, it became very tough to get them to do anything. And, of course, a country like Kuwait is totally dependent on the United States, although we depend on them to invade Iraq and do other things. Then, there is the press aspect. The press part was very difficult. I have always been disappointed in that. I was appalled that people weren’t getting a fair hearing. Tony Lake, former National Security Advisor, and Abner Mikva, former counsel to the President, wrote an Op-Ed on it, but The New York Times and the Washington Post refused to print it. This just shows the terror, the fear, that was instilled at the time. It was finally printed in the Boston Globe, but with very little care, and so it was sort of ignored. Before this, I always had a faith that, somehow, the press would step forward and condemn bad things when they happened, as they did in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. I thought there were controls like that. So when people would not stand up and say things, I was shocked. Another story, which is still incredible to me: about this time, I talked to a producer at 60 Minutes , who was interested in doing a story about Guantanamo, questioning whether all these people should be detained. After about two weeks, she called me back and said the network decided it didn’t want to do the story because ‘it was too political and controversial’. Can you imagine that? CBS was unwilling to get involved because the issue was too political and controversial. It became clear to me at this point how the hysteria of 9/11 caused the country to lose its way and lose its way for a pretty long time. I previously had always believed that we had checks in our society that would stop real excesses. Maybe I was naïve about that, but I was surprised at the way the press did not work as a check. They really, by and large, did not question the Bush administration. There was no opposition party willing to stand up; the law schools and student bodies remained silent. CJLPA : With the press refusing to print the essential information you had on Guantanamo, I assume the public still did not know the truth about Guantanamo at this point in time? TW : That’s correct. I remember, at one party, somebody saying to me: ‘Tom, it is very hard for us to understand. You say the facts are that there is nothing on these people. But the government keeps telling us that these are all bad guys’. Without the press or Congress investigating it, there was no way for the public to know. It was like shouting in the dark. I tried to get some facts out, for example, about the bounties. I found out from an insider from the National Security Council in 2004, six months before the presidential election, that the Central Intelligence Agency had done a report in 2002 which showed that most of these people at Guantanamo shouldn’t be there. It was closeted; nobody could get to it. I got the name of the person who wrote the report—the CIA agent, but they would not testify voluntarily. They were prohibited from doing so. But they could have been subpoenaed. I tried to get Congress to subpoena this person and they wouldn’t—even the Democrats wouldn’t help. They never subpoenaed that guy for a closed session to learn the facts. It was very hard to get the facts out. Still, to this day, people do not know. CJLPA : Reflecting back, why do you think no one spoke up, no one scrutinised or challenged the Bush administration? Why were people so quick to accept this corrupt and illegal prison? TW : It’s interesting. I remember sitting once, at a table with two young law school professors. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m from the Vietnam generation. If something like this were happening, our law schools would be exploding. We wouldn’t tolerate this. Why aren’t you complaining? What’s going on?’ After a while, they looked at me and said: ‘You’re right. But we’ve got two young kids, and we’re afraid’. I thought—I read stuff like this on the rise of Nazism in Germany, and it just chilled me. Silence, in itself, is a betrayal. I would go to cocktail parties and people would sit around drinking and laughing, and I would think, what were the Germans doing when Hitler came to power? Were they all laughing and drinking, as these things were going on? I knew we had people in a concentration camp, innocent people, and we’re sitting and drinking. CJLPA : At this point, the diplomats failed them, the media failed them, and the law schools failed them. The burden was on you to not only expose the reality about Guantanamo Bay that the Bush administration fought so hard to conceal from the public, but also, to help find a way to get your clients released. What happened after you filed the case? TW : The government filed a response. The government’s argument was very straightforward. The government argued that because the detainees were non-US citizens and were being held outside the United States, they had no rights and no right to go to court. They based that argument primarily on Johnson v. Eisentrager , a 1950 Supreme Court case which had involved the case of twenty-one Germans who were convicted of war crimes after World War II. This case had held that a habeas case challenging convictions in a military court, by Germans overseas who had never been in the United States, could not go forward. The government’s argument was that the detainees do not have a right to habeas corpus because at no time were they present in a place over which the United States has jurisdiction. They were ‘outside the sovereignty of the United States’. Confusing language. The government therefore compared it to Eisentrager , asserting that aliens—non-US citizens—without property or presence in the United States have no constitutional rights and no access to our courts. The interesting thing here was the formalism. The government’s argument really played into the weakness of lawyers. Lawyers tend to think in boxes, and there is a conventional assumption among lawyers in the United States that all rights come from the Constitution of the United States. But this is not true. We argued that, before there was a Constitution, there was the right to a fair procedure and a fair hearing. The fundamental rule of law was established in the Magna Carta, that ‘no free man can be deprived of his liberty or property, except in accordance with the law’. Habeas corpus was developed by the courts to enforce that—you cannot be thrown in prison except in accordance with the law, which means there needs to be a law you are accused of violating, and there has to be a factual basis for thinking you did it. This concept existed long before the Constitution. So the issue actually was why people need to have constitutional rights to have a right to a fair hearing. It was a right under the common law before there was a Constitution. It was formalistic. Formal distinctions were being used to deprive people of a fundamental fairness—a fair hearing. Somebody could reach beyond that. I had no doubt that the judges who used to be on that Court, not just liberal judges but good judges, would have cut through this. CJLPA : But they didn’t. In 2003, the Court of Appeal decided in the government’s favour. What were your next steps? TW : We looked into the possibility of getting cert [certiorari] on the case. In fact, I think one of the great accomplishments of the whole legal effort was getting the Supreme Court to take cert in Rasul. CJLPA : How did you and your legal team accomplish this? TW : In order for the Supreme Court to take a case, it must raise a major issue. So, we tried to make the case a major public issue. We tried again with the press and this time, we were luckier. We got a break—the 60 Minutes II interview aired just about that time. Also, I got an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal . Once we got the press involved, we wrote the petition to get certiorari. We emphasised the consequences of denying cert, namely that: If the Court accepted the government’s argument, it would allow the executive to be able to manipulate the law. It would give the executive the ability to say when the Court can and cannot review a case. By simply moving across a geographic line, just by imprisoning foreigners outside the US, the US government could deprive the Court of jurisdiction and deprive people of constitutional rights. In other words, the Court gives the executive branch the unilateral power to manipulate the jurisdiction of the courts and to avoid judicial review of its own actions. That violates the basic separation of powers concept established by the Constitution. If the Court approved this, the US would become an outlier among the community of civilised nations, depriving people of hearings. The Eisentrager decision the Government relied upon was written by Justice Jackson. Justice Jackson, a few years later, had written a dissent in a case called Shaughnessy v. Mezei [1953] in respect to a law passed that allowed the government to deport immigrants entry to the US without due process. Jackson stated: ‘It is inconceivable to me that this measure of simple justice and fair dealing would menace the security of this country. No one can make me believe that we are that far gone’. We drew the analogy and relied heavily on Justice Jackson’s opinion in that case. Finally, another argument that I think resonated with the Court came from an interview I had done with CBS. As it turned out, iguanas at Guantanamo were protected by US law. Iguanas had stronger protection than living beings at Guantanamo. CJLPA : What was the result of this? TW : We successfully got cert. And after we got cert, we then argued the case in court and won the landmark case with the Supreme Court. CJLPA : What happened after you won Rasul? A: Right after Rasul , we really thought we had won the case, that we had won what we were after—a fair hearing before a neutral judge for the people at Guantanamo, to see whether there was any basis for holding them there. The story after Rasul is a legal story. Nine days after Rasul, the Department of Defense instituted a sort of administrative review process at Guantanamo called the Combatant Status Review Tribunals [CSRTs]. Deputy Secretary [Paul D] Wolfowitz issued an order saying they were doing this as part of internal management, and set up panels of three officers—colonel and lower level—to review the decisions that these people were enemy combatants. From the outset, it was clear that these were- sham proceedings. In about ninety-two percent of the cases they just confirmed the decisions that had already been made—that the people were enemy combatants. The detainees were not allowed to see any evidence against them that was classified, and almost all of it was classified. They were not allowed to present evidence on their own unless the CSRT panel said it was reasonably available, and they almost never found that it was reasonably available. Nobody was allowed to call a witness who wasn’t in Guantanamo, and three-quarters of those requests for witness at Guantanamo were denied. It was a joke. When the CSRT panel found that somebody was not an enemy combatant, the government had new panels convened until they found that they were enemy combatants. Anyway, these were the proceedings given to the detainees. Some of the new lawyers in the case filed to participate in those proceedings. We opposed that. CJLPA : Why did you oppose this? TW : We opposed it for three reasons. First,- they were going to lose. Second, in losing, it would sanctify the process as meaningful. And third, whilst a few detainees were ‘cleared’, it soon became clear that in most of those cases, the government would have a do-over panel. CJLPA : How were these military panels justified, in light of winning Rasul? TW : The government argued that, even though we won the right to go to court under the Rasul decision for habeas corpus, in order to obtain relief for habeas corpus, the detainees would need to show that their constitutional rights have been violated. Because these detainees are foreigners outside the US, they have no constitutional rights. They should be thrown out of court. And, in any event, they asserted that, whatever due process rights they have, they are more than satisfied by these Combatant Status Review Tribunals. As I said earlier, the argument was premised on a different box that lawyers fall into, which was a real lack of understanding of what habeas corpus meant. CJLPA : What does habeas corpus mean? TW : Habeas corpus, since the Civil War, had really been to protect freed black men and women from being held by a state in violation of the Constitution. Before that, habeas was what I call the ‘Tower of London’ habeas, where somebody is thrown into the Tower of London on the whim of the King without basis in the law. Habeas was the procedure that required the government to demonstrate there was a lawful basis for the detention. Habeas preceded the Constitution—it had nothing to do with the Constitution. But, interestingly, most lawyers—as did the courts—fell into that trap—that to win in habeas, you had to show a violation of the Constitution, because habeas proceedings in the United States for the past 150 years had been conducted to remedy a violation of the Constitution. CJLPA : Did you go back to court? TW : Yes. Numerous cases were filed after Rasul and the courts consolidated ten cases under the name Al Odah. We argued that based on the Rasul opinion, it was clear that these people in Guantanamo did have constitutional protections, because the Court had determined that Guantanamo was in the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. We therefore argued that constitutional rights applied to people within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. More importantly, however, irrespective of whether the detainees had constitutional protections, we further argued that the petitioner’s right to habeas does not depend on constitutional rights. The right to habeas was antecedent to, and not dependent on, the Constitution. CJLPA : Did the court agree with your legal arguments? TW : Judge Green, who had the ten consolidated cases, agreed. Judge Leon, who had not consolidated another case, the Boumediene case, ruled the other way. At that point, Judge Green entered a stay of all the cases, pending the outcome of the appeals. Then we had to go up to the Court of Appeals, and it was an amazing process. I think we had three separate arguments before the Court of Appeals because of all the things that developed in the cases. I argued for the Al Odah group of cases, and Steve Oleskey argued for the Boumediene one. It was a seminal argument on what happened in the case, and, to me, it shows one of those few times when oral arguments can really make a difference. Although we had very clearly written why you did not need constitutional rights to be able to have habeas relief, it was clear to me when we got up to argue that the court of three judges—Judge [Raymond] Randolph, Judge [David B] Sentelle, and Judge [Judith AW] Rogers—were trapped in the same conventional wisdom that habeas relief requires a violation of constitutional right. I posed two questions to them to try to demonstrate that was wrong: Let’s say the government passes a law saying it can arrest and detain all red-headed people. You could challenge that as being unconstitutional, but you can also go in and say: ‘I’m not red-headed. You’ve made a factual mistake’. It had nothing to do with the Constitution. They started to get it. Let me give you another example. Let’s say we’re in a war with Japan, and the government passes a law saying we can detain anyone of Japanese descent. This is, of course, the Korematsu case [ Korematsu v. United States , 1944]. Let’s say somebody goes into court and says: ‘That is unconstitutional. It’s a violation of equal protection’, and the court says: ‘It’s allowed’. Let’s say another guy comes in and says: ‘I don’t care about the Constitution. You’ve got the wrong guy. My name is not Hara, it is O’Hara. I am Irish, not Japanese’. This is purely a factual question. It has nothing to do with the Constitution. Habeas is a procedure that addresses factual as well as legal and constitutional errors. The judges got it. We clearly won the argument. CJLPA : What happened next? TW : We argued that in September, and we were probably down in Guantanamo at the beginning of November. While we were down in Guantanamo, I heard that a provision had been introduced in Congress to revoke the right to habeas corpus. I came back and fought it. CJLPA : After a strong argument in court which looked like it would go in your favour, the government interfered by trying to amend the relevant law? TW : Yes. When the government also thought they had lost the argument against us, they went to Lindsey Graham, who put an amendment onto the Defense Appropriation Authorizations bill at that time, November 2005, to revoke the writ of habeas corpus for detainees at Guantanamo. I had feared this would happen. I remember we had had a call earlier, with all the new habeas corpus lawyers—as we often did—talking about the brief. Somebody was saying that: ‘We should go to Congress and press them on this’, and I said: ‘Leave Congress alone. It’s a Republican majority. I don’t want to stir them up. Let the courts handle this. I’m confident that if they ever get the courts to rule, we can win on this’. Then I remember this colleague saying, ‘Oh, they’re surely not going to revoke habeas corpus. It’s one of the most ancient writs there is’. Congress voted to change it. The change took out some language in the effective date provision dealing with habeas corpus that was in the other parts of the bill. Then, the case of Hamdan [ v. Rumsfeld , 2006] had reached the Supreme Court. In Hamdan , the Supreme Court decided that the revocation of habeas only applied prospectively . It also decided that the military commissions system, as set up, was constitutionally deficient and contrary to other laws already on the books. So it basically said: ‘If Congress wants to do this, it’s got to change the laws’. CJLPA : And Congress did? TW : Yes, Congress did. It went right back and revoked habeas corpus retroactively in the Military Commissions Act. There were still some loopholes we could try to go through. But they revoked habeas corpus retroactively and changed the military commissions system. CJLPA : What was the morale like at this point? It seemed that even with every win in court, the executive would interfere with justice to ensure you would not win. TW : I remember one of the Kuwaiti detainees, prisoners, a brilliant guy—Fayez Al-Kandari—told me: ‘Tom, I think you’re a great lawyer and a great guy, but I got to tell you, the law is not going to win this. We’re not going to get out of here until the US President decides we should get out of here. They’ll always find a way to keep us here’. And that’s what’s happened. And it’s a great disgrace for the law. I mean, we talk about the rule of law. CJLPA : Did you ever bring violations of international law as an argument to the courts? TW : No, it was not a strong argument. Actually, Michael Ratner and his staff at CCR would push arguments that were irritating to the courts, and have no chance of winning. Specifically, Geneva Convention arguments. No matter how strongly you might believe in them, the US courts are not going to simply defer to international law. On the other hand, there are times when Congress incorporates international law into US law. Then, the courts will or should pay attention. CJLPA : What was most challenging at this point in the litigation? TW : To me, the most difficult thing after Rasul was not being able to make decisions that I was convinced were in the best interest of the client because the Court was requiring us, on behalf of these ten cases, to file one brief. We couldn’t split into a separate brief. We had to make one argument, file one brief. We had to do all these things. We did have another series of briefing and arguments to the Court of Appeal and as expected, we lost on that 2-1, with Sentelle and Randolph voting against us, and Judith Rogers voting for us. We then petitioned for cert again, and the Supreme Court denied it in April 2007. I was heartbroken. I thought the Supreme Court would grant cert, as everyone did. CJLPA : What did you do next? TW : We put the Boumediene case name first in our petition to the Supreme Court because of some good facts in that case. The case is now known as Boumediene . The team continued to exhaust available remedies, gathering evidence and reports. We drafted a brief, that was about three or four pages long, and we attached a Military Intelligence officer, Colonel Abraham’s declaration admitting the CRST panels were a sham. The Supreme Court eventually reversed itself and granted cert. It was monumental! My own view is that the Abraham declaration, which has been credited with the grant of cert, was not the reason. I think it was really the government’s performance in between. It had been so outrageous and overreaching that it irritated the Court, including Justice Kennedy, who was the key vote. CJLPA : What was the outcome of this case when it finally got to the Supreme Court? TW : The Court, in Boumediene/Al Odah in June 2008, concluded that Congress could not revoke the detainees’ right to habeas because they are entitled to habeas under the Constitution. It ordered that these people are entitled to prompt habeas hearings. At that time, all my remaining clients had been released, which put me in an odd position. CJLPA : Why were all your clients released? TW : They were released not because we won the Supreme Court cases, but because the government just decided to release them after years of detainment. They sent them back home. CJLPA : What occurred next? After the right to habeas corpus was extended, a significant percentage of detainees won their habeas cases in the district court. However, a 2010 opinion from the DC circuit by Judge Randolph countered this success, stating that while detainees might have the right to habeas corpus, they don’t have the right to due process. Judge Randolph’s statement that Guantanamo detainees have no right to due process in the habeas corpus hearings to which they are constitutionally entitled is, frankly, absurd. Habeas corpus grants the right to a hearing. Due process ensures that the hearing will be fair. As Justice Scalia wrote: ‘Due process [is] the right secured, and habeas corpus [is] the instrument by which due process could be insisted upon’. Without due process, habeas corpus is a sham. Yet the DC Circuit allowed this absurd statement to control habeas proceedings for more than a decade and, after finally taking the issue up en banc, and pondering the issue for more than a year, decided not to decide it. It’s just extraordinary. If judges will not act to safeguard individual liberties, who then will? CJLPA : To date, are you still involved in any litigation involving Guantanamo? TW : Yes, I represent Khalid Qassim. I’ve had him now for seven or eight years. We got him originally to contest the ruling that they have no due-process rights. It’s interesting because you can’t win a hearing if you can’t contest the allegations against you. You don’t know the basis for them. The allegations against this man, Qassim, are basically that he was a foot soldier 20-some years ago after 9/11 in the battle of Afghanistan. That’s something he denies vehemently, but he can’t see who’s making the allegation. So we wanted for him to have the right to do that. CJLPA : Where does this leave Qassim now in respect to his prospect of being released? TW : In June 2019 we won a case before one panel of the DC Circuit saying that the detainees should have the right to due process. Then another panel in another case held the other way, and it’s still sitting there. Then, shortly after the last US soldier withdrew, we filed a motion for summary judgment asking the court to release our client, Khalid Qassim, arguing that the end of the armed conflict ended the government’s legal authority to detain him and the others like him who were taken into custody not because they were allegedly terrorists but because they were essentially foot soldiers in an armed conflict that is now over. We were unable to get a hearing on our motion until early December last year (mainly because the Al Hela case over the question whether the detainees were entitled to due process was pending before the en banc DC Circuit). The hearing was before Senior Judge Thomas Hogan, who had been the presiding judge since Neil Koslowe and I first became involved in this case about seven years ago. The hearing was long, held both in open session and in closed session to consider classified data, and it went very well. At the end of the closed session, Judge Hogan thanked me for presenting new arguments that cast additional light on the key issues, and he promised to write an opinion deciding the motion. Following the hearing, we submitted a short post-hearing memorandum summarising our basic legal arguments and responding directly to questions the judge had asked during the hearing whether these arguments had been raised in other cases. In summary, we said habeas corpus remains the single most important protection of individual liberty in Anglo-American law—it is what Blackstone called ‘The stable bulwark of our liberties’. But it depends entirely on judges being willing to carry out their critical responsibility to ensure that no person is deprived of liberty without legal authority. Judges have been unwilling to accept that responsibility at Guantanamo. We pointed out that, based on the Supreme Court’s opinion and acts of Congress, the end of the armed conflict ended the legal authority to detain Qassim. The judge gave the government until the end of February to respond, which it did (a day late). We then waited anxiously for a decision. CJLPA : What was the decision? TW : Toward the end of July, we approached government counsel to consent to a status conference before the judge, and we were informed that the case had been reassigned from Judge Hogan to Senior Judge Richard Leon. We still have no idea why. Whatever the reason, however, we were extremely disappointed to learn that this case that had been fully briefed and argued and was ripe for decision had been reassigned to a different judge, that much time had therefore been wasted and we essentially had to start over, and that Qassim’s legally unauthorised detention would not only continue but be prolonged for many more months. CJLPA : What did you do next? TW : To avoid further delay, we immediately moved to present an oral argument to Judge Leon. He promptly denied the motion in a one-sentence minute order: ‘Upon consideration of petitioner’s Motion for Hearing and respondents’ Response, it is hereby ORDERED that the motion is DENIED’. Judge Leon apparently believes that oral argument would not be helpful to him in deciding this case, which had been pending before him for seven months. CJLPA : Has Judge Leon since made a decision? TW : Yes. After refusing to hear the oral arguments, Judge Leon issued a short opinion at the end of last week denying our motion for release based on the end of combat. He did so without even addressing our arguments. Another striking example of denial of justice at Guantanamo and of the refusal of the courts to carry out their fundamental responsibility to safeguard individual liberty from arbitrary government detention. We are seeking ways to appeal. CJLPA : That’s outrageous. I don’t understand how, given the public knowledge that the US government captured and kidnapped prisoners who we know are not ‘terrorists’, they are not immediately released? TW : It is absolutely outrageous! They were never charged. That’s why the US government never claimed them to be terrorists. The important thing about Guantanamo Bay is that they are not claiming them to be terrorists. Everybody confuses that. And because they were never charged, they cannot be heard in court. CJLPA : Further to my previous questions, despite the clear illegality, Guantanamo Bay remains open. How is this possible? TW : Dating back to 2008, I met with the Obama administration and helped write their order saying that they would close Guantanamo within a year. I then worked with Greg Craig who was the counsel of the White House. He’s a great guy. To close Guantanamo, the US had to get other countries to accept the detainees, but also, within the US as well. The first detainees we considered were Uyghur detainees, who had been, quite clearly, captured by mistake. Greg had negotiated a deal to locate the Uyghurs into northern Virginia where there’s now a larger Uyghur community. When Frank Wolf heard about it, that was the beginning of the politicisation. He made various public comments such as: ‘How can you let a terrorist into our territory?’. What was President Obama’s response? Rather than saying: ‘Listen, everyone knows these guys are innocent and have been deprived of their liberty for all these years’, instead, he backed away. Then, the Republicans smelled blood and they imposed all these restrictions on the President’s ability to transfer people. The restrictions included not transferring anyone in the United States, or to Yemen or certain other countries, needing to get Congress approval, etc. It made the process extremely difficult and a pain. So, Obama’s administration didn’t do it because the political pressure pushed them away. I then again met with the Biden administration at the beginning, and I’m telling you, I know they want to close Guantanamo. I corresponded with Tony Blinken, and he is a great guy, Secretary of State. But again, they’ve got a 50-50 Senate and a long list of priorities. Before these political administrations, 30 foreigners at Guantanamo don’t rise very high. There’s always something more important. You can’t count on the political branches. At the end of the day, you need the courts, and I never thought the courts would be the answer here. They’re the branch whose duty it is to safeguard individual liberties in accordance with the law. But the courts are very divided now too, and they’re affected by politics. They’ve been such a disappointment. CJLPA : How did the rule of law and the US justice system become so grossly deprived? TW : The court did not step in when it needed to. The court deferred to the government on everything, even when the government, time and time again, was proven to either be lying or at least not know what was happening. The court put up with it. So we were fighting the government, but the court put up with it at every stage. So I am terribly upset with the courts. People lost any faith in the American judicial system and, honestly, so did I. The whole purpose of Guantanamo, in the administration’s mind, was to create a law-free zone. The Bush administration proceeded from the premise that the laws were an impediment to fighting the war on terrorism. They felt they had to avoid the law—and lawyers—in order to fight the war on terrorism. CJLPA : In the name of fighting terrorism, do we need to sacrifice justice for safety? TW : No. What the executive branch never understood was that the laws are compatible with our security. Being a nation of laws and following the laws makes us stronger in fighting terrorism. Guantanamo is a symbol, a place where you can avoid the law. But that has stained our reputation and hurt us around the world. Embracing the laws allows the executive to do everything it needs to for safety if they just follow the law. The law ensures that, if there is any doubt, you give them a hearing. Big deal. The only reason there would be no hearing is because there is fear: fear that they are innocent. The laws protect the innocent. But more than that, it protects justice, and ensures that we are a nation governed by law and justice and not by passion and revenge. I was fundamentally upset that the courts tolerated law-free zones. The government’s intimidation, in violation of their own rules, was unreasonable. They operated in pretty much a law-free zone—and the press was extraordinary. We would come out and tell them stories about what the detainees said, that they had been abused, that they didn’t have reading material. The government would simply deny it. The press was left in a situation where they often did not know, so it was hard to get scrutiny on it. And who were we? We were just advocates for ‘terrorists’. CJLPA : On a final note, what is a key takeaway about the justice system in ensuring history does not repeat itself? TW : Guantanamo is exceptional for any of us, and what we otherwise expect and hope our world to be—a fair and just world running according to law. I think I was, and still am, most disturbed that in a country where people espouse fairness, which much of our life is really based on, how easily people turned away from it. Our principles, the rule of law and justice, are not incompatible with protecting our security. They make us stronger in these things. That is the right chord. How we lost our way and how people do not care is amazing to me. But we’ve got to keep fighting. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024.

In January 2018, veteran actress Caroline Lagerfelt stepped into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She was there to see ‘Ode to the Sea’, an exhibition of artwork by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which at that point had been open for 16 years, with no end in sight.   Lagerfelt had known about the atrocities committed at Guantanamo for some time. In fact, she had played British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce in a play about Guantanamo 14 years earlier, and became a staunch advocate of the facility’s closure. As she walked through the exhibition, she was stunned by the beauty and intricacy of the works—Moath al Alwi’s ‘meticulously crafted ship’ from bits of cardboard and other found materials within the detention facility, Muhammad Ansi’s painting of two hands grasping the bars of a prison window with flowers.[1] Ms Lagerfelt later recounted that ‘one of the most powerful paintings is Vertigo at Guantanamo  by Ammar al Baluchi, a multi-coloured swirl that he painted to reflect the brain injury he suffered as a result of the brutal torture he underwent’.[2] Vertigo at Guantanamo  was, literally and figuratively, the product of years of torture, detention, interrogations, and ‘prosecution’ without end, all without basic medical or physical care. Ammar al Baluchi disappeared in Pakistan in April 2003. Soon thereafter, the CIA rendered him to the infamous ‘black sites’, where he would spend the next three and a half years entirely incommunicado, in violation of long standing international law.[3] His family had no idea where he was, and he had no news of them during that time. Former detainee Muhammad Ansi depicted the agony of incommunicado detention in his artwork.

Bo Kyi is a Burmese human rights activist and founder of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a human rights organization that advocates for the release of political prisoners in Burma and works to document prison conditions, unlawful arrests, and detention-related abuses carried out by the Burmese government. The AAPP also provides humanitarian assistance and other support to current and former political prisoners and their families. Bo Kyi is a former political prisoner due to to his participation in pro-democracy protests during the 1988 uprising. Assistance Association for Political Prisoners Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.   CJLPA : Can you tell us about your first interactions with politics during the 1988 student movement and what made you want to get involved with anti-government protests?   Bo Kyi : I was born in a country where fear was pervasive. We feared imprisonment, there was a fear of being tortured, losing a loved one or home, a fear of losing your dignity, a fear of poverty and forced labor. The military dictatorship began in 1962, three years before I was born. But by the time I was a teenager I already understood that our university students had long been at the heart of political movements in Burma, since before colonial independence.

This article explores an uncomfortable reality that locates international humanitarian and development organisations as sometimes unwitting, sometimes witting facilitators of the state crime of genocide and in doing so reveals the stark and sometimes lethal contradictions inherent in the overarching organisational goals and principles to which these organisations adhere. Our focus is on the Burmese/Myanmar Rohingya genocide, and the immediate pressures, moral dilemmas, and institutional strictures faced by humanitarian actors in the critical years following the 2012 Sittwe massacres, before the annihilation phase of the genocide in 2016/17.[1]   While the Genocide Convention defines genocide as ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’,[2] we favour a definition which captures both this outcome but also more significantly the processes which lead to destruction. Genocide is a process which begins with dehumanisation and ends with erasure. In between and often concurrent are occasions of litmus-testing violence, structural discrimination, state denial of persecution, forced isolation and ghettoisation, and systematic weakening.[3] The Convention definition was dogged by criticism from the outset, including from Lemkin[4] who was disappointed with the final iteration (including the exclusion of ‘cultural genocide’), the convention definition being the lowest common agreeable denominator.   We write elsewhere about the complicit role of elements of the United Nations (UN) in the Rohingya genocide.[5] Contextually, however, and given its widely proclaimed ‘moral leadership’ in the field of human rights, it is important to understand that the UN systematically failed to challenge the Myanmar government on the genocidal human rights abuses which were to lead to the effective annihilation of Myanmar’s Rohingya in 2017. Rather than demand the closure of the Rohingya detention camps the UN, through its Resident Coordinator and agencies, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP), actively contributed to their sustainability through the provision of food and limited medical aid. In doing so it worked with the Myanmar regime to support a system of brutal apartheid in which the incarcerated Rohingya were reduced to ‘bare life’.[6] It suppressed its critics and silenced those who advocated against the regime on behalf of the Rohingya. By elevating development at the expense of human rights and by ensuring relations with the regime were conducive to UN access, the UN effectively colluded with the regime’s genocidal project. This is not to suggest that the UN (or indeed the humanitarian organisations we will now consider) in any way shared the genocidal intention of the Myanmar regime but that its actions and organisational goals served quite explicitly to facilitate rather than challenge the genocide.

Marie-Claire Kakpotia Koulibaly is a feminist and activist fighting to end Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and forced marriages. Marie-Claire is the founder and director of the Les Orchidées Rouges, an NGO that is committed to the elimination of FGM and organizes legal and medical support for its victims. CJLPA : Welcome, Marie-Claire Kakpotia Koulibaly. I’d like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art  to discuss your story as a women’s rights activist fighting against female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriage. We would like to begin by learning more about your personal story. To the extent you feel comfortable, can you tell us how you fell victim to FGM and how old you were at the time?   Marie-Claire Kakpotia Koulibaly : I got FGM when I was nine years old, and at that time, I didn’t know that it was FGM. It was painful. It was painful and very difficult for me, but I didn’t know that it was FGM. And I didn’t know that the part of me that took out was my clitoris. So, I realised years later, several years later.   CJLPA : And how was it that you became aware of what happened to you?   MK : I became aware when I was 15, almost 16 years old. I left my home city to go to the capital of Cote d’Ivoire, where people don’t practice FGM. So, people were t elling me that FGM is a very bad thing. But I realised it really when I met a man from Italy, and one day, we decided to have sex, and as soon as he saw me naked, he stopped me  and asked , ‘where is your clitoris?’. And I said, ‘I don’t know, where is it?’. He told me I had been mutilated . ‘You cannot be a normal woman; you cannot have a normal life’. And after, he left me, and didn’t contact me again, because he could not finish due to my FGM, so it was very difficult for me because I couldn’t  finish either. I had that feeling of being broken and undesirable when I was 19 years old.   CJLPA : Thank you for sharing. When  he told you  that you were mutilated, and that you didn’t have what a woman would need, did you reflect then, back on what had happened when at such a young age you were cut? What was it like when you were initially first being cut? Did it seem normal at the time? Or were you very much afraid of what was happening and scared of the surroundings? Did you know at the time, what the implications were? Were you afraid or did it seem more of a normal practice that everyone around you was doing?   MK : It was when I was nine years old. It was very painful  and  very difficult for me. In my mind, I was thinking that it  wa s a normal practice, that it wa s a part of my education, because every girl and woman around me w as mutilated. So, for me , it was normal. They didn ’t explain to me why they were doing it, and I didn’t ask questions because it   wa s very taboo. I was only a child and I saw many girls mutilated — so for me, it was okay, it was normal.  It was painful, it was difficult, girls were crying — I was crying also, because they had told me that we had been invited to a party and I was very happy to g o. But when I got inside, it wasn’t a party. It is difficult when you are nine years old and four women slam you to the ground and one takes  out a knife and cuts  into your vagina without anaesthesia. It  was the worst pain I have ever felt in my life.   CJLPA : I can’t even begin to imagine the fear and the thoughts that come, as a young child at nine years old, just being pinned down. From today’s perspective, can you speak more towards this practice? Why it is that FGM is performed on young woman? Is there a reason behind it? What does it symbolise?   MK : FGM designates all the practices which cut the external genital organs of women. They have different reasons to justify FGM all o ver the world . In some parts of the world, they say that girls must undergo FGM to become a real woman. Sometimes they say it is cleaner to get FGM. And in some communities, if a woman is not mutilated, she’s considered a dirty woman, and nobody wants to speak with her, nob ody to eat the food she cooks. Parents e ven say to their children, ‘no, no, don’t play with that girl or that boy, because their mother is not mutilated’. So, there are various social pressures to mutilate girls and women and in many parts of the world, they mutilate the girls and women because they want them to remain v irgins until marriage. And when they get married, they want them to be faithful to their husband , to not cheat.  So, they want to control a woman’s body, they want to control a woman’s sexuality, and they want to control a woman’s life. It is gender-based  violence  w hich destroys girls and women’s lives, because it has  long lasting consequences, very bad consequences into adulthood.   CJLPA : From your experiences, you talk about how horrible it was for you. Why is it the other women — who have also probably felt the same fear and horror — think this must continue? You also mentioned your grandma’s involvement — I’m assuming she was cut as well . So, after all that she experienced, how could she let it happen to you as well?   MK : It is because of the social pressure, because in these communities, if a woman is not mutilated, she cannot find a husband . It is i mpossible, because men on ly  want to marry mutilated women . And i n these communities, women are nothing if they don’t have a husband. It is very important in these communities to have to get married before 30 years old. So, the mothers have the pressure to give their girls a  chance to get  a husband. And to get a husband for them, one of the conditions is to be mutilated. If a woman refuses to mutilate her girls, her husband will divorce her. Even if the husband doesn’t divorce her, the family of the husband will say she is not a good woman, if she doesn’t want to mutilate her girls. So it is very difficult for them.   That is why in my work, I want female  empowerment, mental empowerment, physical empowerment, and financial empowerment. I want female  liberation, because when women are liberated, they can say ‘no, I don’t want to mutilate my daughter  because it is a horrible practice, because now I’m suffering because of FGM so I don’t want my girl to suffer like me’. Even though they  know that it is not a good practice, they  continue because they don’t have money or the opportunity  to be emancipated by society. So it is important to raise awareness to prevent this practice but also to help women to become empowered, because the empowerment of women will stop FGM.   CJLPA :   What would happen to young girls who tried to resist being cut?   MK : When you are young it is very difficult to resist because they never warn you. They will never tell you ‘I will mutilate you!’. They are very kind, they say ‘oh, come to a party, oh come with me, we will visit your grandmother’, or a grandmother can say ‘ I want to see my grandchildren ’, and when you go to them, they mutilate girls. Sometimes my institute helps families even in Europe. They have come back from vacation and their baby girl has been mutilated whilst they left them with their family. So it is very difficult to resist. The better way to resist is not to go there, not to go into the community, because if you go there, if the girls and the women go over there,  and  they don’t pay attention, they  may cut the baby . Sometimes even the  neighbours cut girls of another family. So, it is very difficult to resist. And when you are a young girl, there are sometimes three or four women . I t is very difficult to resist because physically they are more powerful than you. So the best way t o resist  is not to go there, because it is very difficult to escape. When a woman here in Bordeaux tells me she wants to go to a country  where they mutilate women,  I say ‘if you go there, you have to sleep with your baby girls, you have to have them with you at all times. Because if you leave them alone, or if you leave them with the family, you will  get a very  bad surprise’.   CJLPA : From your experience, and from speaking to FGM survivors, how can FGM affect young girls later on in life, in terms of the trauma that they’ve endured?   MK : FGM can impact women psychologically, physically, and also socially. Psychologically, because many women, like me, develop a lack of self-confidence. They hate their body . Often, survivors tell me ‘I don’t like my body, my body is horrible. I don’t want to look at my vagina’. So, it is very difficult to be happy when you don’t like your body, when you don’t have self-confidence or self-esteem. It is very difficult to build your future.  S urvivors tell me they want to die, they want to die because life is so difficult for them, because they’re undesirable, because they cannot have a normal sexual life. Because they cannot be happy sexually. And sometimes also, they don’t make  good decisions for their life, because when they develop a lack of self-confidence, sometimes they choose a man who is not good for them . Because we’re so sad. They choose the man who is right in front of them, and they don’t wait for the right one.  So it is difficult to be happy in their personal life.   Sexually, it is  very, very painful for some of them. T hey can also have gynaecology problems because of FGM. When they give birth to a baby, they or the bab y could die because of FGM. And socially, they could stay in poverty because of FGM. Sometime s   due to FGM, women  can become sick on a long-term basis, often due to sexual infections,  meaning they cannot continue going to schoo l.  And so, they stay in poverty. And during the FGM procedure, they can die because of the blood loss — FGM generally i s not done in a hospital, it is done somewhere outside , in a forest or somewhere in a smaller room with no medical equipment — so they can die, and often they do die.   CJLPA : Have you spoken to cutters before? What was their response? Do they have any sense of empathy for what they’ve done? Do they understand the implications FGM has for women mentally and physically?   MK : I met  a cutter some years ago in Cote d’Ivoire. And I asked her wh y she  cut girls, and she told me it was her grandmother’s  heritage, her grandmother was a cutter.  And before dying, her grandmother gave authority  to that cutter I met in Cote D’Ivoire . I asked her ‘Do you realise that you destroy li ves ? ’ . She said ‘no, it is our tradition. Our ancestors practised FGM. So, we continue practising FGM to honour our ancestors’. I told her she could  honour ancestors without taking  life. And I said, ‘ do  you realise th at girls suffer, many girls suffer, because of your practice?’. She said it is a rich  tradition. S he kept speaking about t radition. But I told her that tra dition must make lives better , not destroy l iv es. Tradition must create an equal society. Tradition must create liberty, freedom, tradition must create wellness, tradition must not create sadness, suffering, it must not create destruction. I told her that sometimes girls die because of her  practice. Tradition cannot justify that. So you must stop practising FGM.   She said, ‘I know that it is difficult, but if we don’t practice FGM then women will become prostitutes’. I said, ‘No, th at is not true. If you want women and girls to have correct behaviour for your community, you can educate them. You don’t need to cut them. You can just educate them, teach  them to respect themselves.  Teach  them to respect  their body . You can respect your body whilst doing  what you want with your body. My body is my choice. You cannot choose for me what  I do  with my body. It is not possible’. I said to them, ‘B y cutting girls, you tell them that their body is not their property. It is a violation of our fundamental rights. So, stop now’ . It must  stop and I told her  that she c ould  go to jail if I hear  that she cut again, she wi ll  go to jail because it is forbidden .   I t is a crime to mut ilate  in many countries. Unfortunately, we still have six countries in the world where it is totally legal to mutilate girls . In 2023, we cannot have some countries where it is normal to cut. It is not a crime in six countries in the world.  W e as an international community must do something about that.  I want the United Nations to make a  decision about the six countries where it is legal to mutilate, and to vote on laws  to criminalise it . Even criminalization is not enough to stop it , but  it is important to vote for a law  to say it is a crime.   CJLPA : You raised some very crucial points that I want to talk about later in the interview. But just going back to your conversation with a cutter — in my head, when you first  started speaking about a cutter, I assumed that it was a man, but it’s another woman. And she thinks that it’s normal practice to tell a woman what to do with their body, take that right away from them. That is the mentality in her head, that this is normal practice. I think it’s just astonishing. And it just shows you that the root of the cause is that from such a young age, women are already told and brought up that they are less than a man, that their body is not theirs, and it’s for other people to decide what to do with it.   It must be so challenging to see the person responsible for what was done to you at such a young age, and then also how she just kept going back and forth with you, saying ‘no, this is the way it is, and this has always been the way and tradition’. How can we address that, how do we get them to understand and how do we help minimise this practice? What can be done?   MK : To stop FGM, it is important to work with cutters like partners, because they need to be educated. They are very ignorant , s o it’s important to work with them. And it is also important  to give them another way to make  money. Because when I discussed it with  her, she realised that it is a bad thing. She said ‘I know that it is  not really a good practice, but it is our tradition’. And she asked me, ‘I want to stop. I want to stop. You are not the first person to tell me that it is not good’. But, she said to me, ‘I don’t have another way to make  money. So if I decided to stop, how can you help me to live, to make  money?’ . That is the real question. How can we convert cutters? How can we inform them? We know how to inform them, we know how to educate them, but it is important to convert them, to allow them to have another job. It is imp ortant to understand  that it is a job for them. It is a job  and they earn a lot of  money, because communities respect them. They are the people  who allow women to become a real woman, to become pure. So it is important, I think, to empower cutters . And we are working on a programme in South Africa, in Côte  d’Ivoire, to raise awareness, to work with cutters and to give them the opportunity to find another job . Because even if we educate them, if we don’t give them the  opportunity to have another job to earn  money, by another way, they will continue.   CJLPA : Definitely. There’s a misconception that FGM is just an African problem, when the reality is that women fall victim to this or all over the world, including in Europe. Why do you think people don’t know this occurs in every country that they live in?   MK : I think that people think that it is just in African countries, an African problem, because in Western countries, police, politicians, and even feminist activists don’t speak loudly about FGM. It is very taboo, even in politics and in activism. So, it is important to spread awareness to highlight the topic of FGM . M any people consider that FGM is a barbaric practice coming from Africa, because Africa is a barbaric continent. So, they cannot imagine that Western countries are also impacted by FGM. Sometimes in my conferences, I tell people that  whilst today it is diaspora communities in  Western countries that practice FGM, until 1960 FGM was practised by white people in hospitals in Europe and in the USA. When I tell people this, they say ‘no, no, no, this is impossible ’, because they say it is a barbaric practice. But yes, in Europ e and countries like France, like the United States, FGM was practiced on women as a supposed ‘cure’ for hysteria, mental illness, or masturbation.[1] They cut the clitoris in hospital, so it was legal.    N ow it has changed,  because it is just other communities  w hich practice FGM. But it is important to highlight  that it is a global issue, because many European girls and women are mutilated, sometimes here in Europe, often  whilst on vac ation. This summer, unfortunately, some girls and women will come back from vacation mutilated, which is the reality. So, it is important for politicians, activists, and organisations which fight for human rights to speak about FGM. Everybody must speak about FG M. I n Europe, and everywhere in Western countries when they speak about gender-based violence, they never mentioned FGM or forced marriage. Never, never, never. So, in my advocacy, when I work with the French government and United Nations, I tell them to mention female genital mutilation and forced marriage when they talk about women ’s rights , because if equality exists, FGM and forced marriage cannot exist. It is one of the manifestations, one of the extreme manifestations of inequality between men and women. So, you cannot talk about gender-based violence without mentioning FGM and forced marriage.   CJLPA : Returning back to Europe, as you mentioned, it is still an ongoing issue. But unlike those six countries, in Europe, it is illegal. Why is FGM still occurring in Europe? Are politicians not getting involved enough? Or are there simply no reports happening, as victims do not come forward?   MK : I’m seeing it continue to  happen in Europe. That is why in my work, I want to speak loudly to highlight the topic. It is very taboo and it happens behind closed doors . Families and survivors involved have social pressure, family pressure, so it is impossible for them to denounce their family. So, this lack of denunciation in the communities, and the denunciation of the survivors, is one of the main reasons why FGM continues to occur in Europe and in Western countries, because if survivors or community members begin to speak louder about this,  it  will stop, but they don’t do that. It is very difficult to identify which families or which communit ies  continue to practice  FGM in Europe.   CJLPA : And following up on your work, you’ve started your own NGO, Les Orchidées Rouges, to help women and young girls who are victims of FGM and forced marriage. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about what inspired you to begin this NGO and what the name symbolises.   MK : I decided to create an  NGO after my reconstruction. When I reconstructed myself, I realised that I have suffered hugely  because of FGM and I also realised that millions of girls and women are suffering because of this practice. So, in my mind, I thought I must act, I have to contribute to the eradication of FGM because I don’t want girls or women go through what I went through. So it was important for me to use my experience , it was also important for me to create innovative solutions to support and give free treatment to survivors, to allow them to b ecome empowered, to allow them to become resilient, and to take power over  their body , their life. Those that practice FGM cannot have the last word over other people’s lives.   CJLPA : That’s truly inspiring, the work that you’ve established and how you’re giving the voice back of young girls and women that have been silenced. What does the name symbolise?   MK : Les Orchidées Rouges . The red orchid. I was talking about my story to a friend. And when I told her my story, at the end, I said, it is like a flower you cut. And the flower grows , the flower is born again, better. So, when I decided to create an NGO, she said to me, ‘Oh, I liked your flower story, can you name your NGO after the name of a flower in Af rican language?’. And I told her, ‘I don’t know the name  of a flower in African language, but I want to choose a flower which is symbolic for me ’. So I found information  on the internet about the red orchid, and I discovered that the meaning of the red orchid i s the very strong desire to have sexual pleasure, to have sex. And they cut girls and women to stop their sexual life, to control their sexual life. So, for me, I decided to call my NGO Les Orchidées Rouges to say that women also have the right to have sexual pleasure, the right to do what we want with our body, the right to be free. And when I looked on the internet, I saw that the flower of an orchid is like the vagina of a woman . We have something like a clitoris, which is cut during FGM. And the meaning of the word ‘les Orchidées’   originates from the  Greek language [ orchis ] and the meaning is a testicle . So then it was clear to me that I had to call the NGO Les Orchidées Rouges.   CJLPA : I wanted to shift the focus a little bit because I know that your NGO also works around forced marriage. Millions of girls around the world were forced into marriage before the age of 18. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about this issue and what your NGO does to address this?   M K : So, we speak about forced marriage  when  we speak with communities, but also when we train professionals in hospitals , in schools . Even European girls are vict im s of forced marriage, when some go on holidays this summer, some will not come back. Even last week, I was talking with a professional in a bank. And she was very sad, because her cousin  went to  Madagascar, but she never came back, because they forced her into a marriage  with  an old man in that country and she stayed there. So we educate those in communities, professionals, even those in schools  about forced ma rriage  and we tell them that we cannot force people to marry . We cannot do that. It is the fundamental right  of girls and women to decide if they want to be married, if they want a person, because the origin of marriage must be love. Love must be the origin. If you force somebody, there’s no love. There’s no love, it is violence. And we tell them that it is a violence, and you sacrifice girls.   Sometimes, they say that it is because of poverty. It is slavery, because women sell their girls, they sell the women of their family to have money to live. I understand that it is difficult to be in poverty, but you cannot sell a person. She  is not an object, she  is not a thing, she  is a person, a person who has rights, fundamental rights. You cannot sell a person. She will suffer and because she will be victim of sexual violence. If you don’t choose your husband , you don’t want to have sex with him, so many forced marriage survivors are victim s of rape. And they’re also a victim of family violence because the men beat the girls or the women when they don’t want to have sex. And she’s like his slave.   CJLPA : Do you think the underlying issue is poverty in the sense that families are so desperate that they are willing to sell their child, as you  said, into slavery? Or do you think it’s more of a mentality issue, of ‘Well, it’s just a woman ’— objectifying a woman as a person? Or do you think it’s a bit of both?   MK : I think that it is a mentality issue. Why don’t they  sell the boys or the men  of the family, why don’t they  sell boys and men? It is a question of women’s  place in society ; women are not respected in society. Across  all kinds of societies in the world, women’s equality exists nowhere. Nowhere. People  think that women are the property of society , any body can decide for women what  they have to do with their life, their body, their sexuality, everything. So, it really is a mentality issue, because   they can’t see that if you are poor,   you can find another solution, you don’t have to sell a person. And i f you sell a person, why is it always the women who are sold? That is why it is important to change the mentalities and to create a place, a respected place for women and girls in all the societies  in the world, because we need to find solutions together, men and women together, to improve our societies. By taking another kind of solution with respect  for everybody, men and women.   CJLPA : That was very powerfu lly said, and I completely agree with you. I wanted to also ask you, from your work and your experience, have you seen progress over the years, or do you find that these issues are just as problematic as before and if not even gotten worse?   MK : I think that we will notice some progress, but it is not fast . It is slow, v ery slow. It is important to accelerate the progression, because millions of women and girls contin ue to suffer. Girls are dying because of FGM, forced marriage , and other types of gender-based violence. And unfortunately, because of the COVID crisis, schools were closed, and when schools are closed, they can cut girls and nobody will be aware . So during the COVID crisis and lockdown , many girls and women were being mutilated behind closed doors, everywhere in the world, many of them mutilated by force . And because of the COVID crisis and lockdown, N GOs like mine were  not able to go into communities to continue raising awareness, so unfortunately, there was a large impact.   There is small, slow progress , but we need it to progress faster. We need the international communities to consider FGM and forced marriage, we need politicians to enforce the laws, to follow the laws which forbid FGM. We want them to criminalise FGM in the countries where it is legal. And we also need funding, we need financial means for NGOs, or for organisations to continue raising awareness, to also continue developing, innovating solutions to accelerate the eradication of FGM.   CJLPA : Absolutely, because there is  a lot of work to do. And as we speak, it’s a constant continuing crisis that’s happening all around the world. And it’s something that more people need to know about. It’s one of the top priorities that should be on the agenda is for politicians and lawyers and ambassadors.   I wanted to ask you what the key message is that we need to send out in respect to FGM and forced marriage for all the readers, in order to spread awareness and push for that motion of urgency amongst readers, politicians, lawyers?   MK :  I want to speak about the importance of education. When I went to schools and communities people of ten told me, ‘Oh my god, for me It was normal to cut girls. And now you opened my mind, you  opened my eyes, I discovered it was not good . And my girls will no w not be mutilated’.  Or sometimes I met some boys, and they tell me that I opened their eyes to FGM and that when they have a baby girl,  she will not be mutilated . For me, it is a victory to listen  to these people. And sometimes I met girls in schools, and they said ‘Oh, I have been mutilated, for me, it was okay . But now, you have opened  my eyes, I know that it is not good. And when I have  a baby, she will not be mutilated’. So, that is why it is important to continue raising awareness, to continue going to meet people in communities, girls and boys in schools, because they are our future, it is important to inform the younger  generations, to prevent  them from making  the same mistakes as the ir ancestors. It ’s very important. And if we have funding, we have  more funds to develop, we will open the eyes and the mind of many . If we have funds, we can develop more activities and open the eyes and the mind of many people in the world to stop FGM.   CJLPA : I think you just said that so beautifully, because the key point with this issue is to raise awareness, but it’s also to educate. Throughout your responses, the underlying problem is, one, mentality: the fact that people think that this is a normal practice, and it is okay to treat women like this. And two, that it’s not a top priority in the agenda and international community as it should be.   On that note, I would like to thank you for your time today and for your courage in having to relive this  trauma by answering these questions. And, of course, your heroic work for women’s rights by exposing these international crimes of FGM and forced marriage, ultimately giving the word, the voice back to women who have been for so long not empowered by strong female figures such as yourself. What would you like to send out as a final message to the readers and politicians about FGM?   MK : My message for politicians and leaders is: I call them to join the fight against female genital mutilation and forced marriage. We need the support. We need the support, and they can support us by engaging themselves seriously, and by taking measures to stop FGM. They cannot talk about gender-based violence of women without talking about FGM.   They are leaders, th ey  are politicians and one of their obligations is to make the world better for everyone. So, if they want to make the world better for everyone, they have to help, they must help us to stop FGM and forced marriage. They cannot continue without acting with us. They cannot, and  we will continue to call them ou t,  we will continue making advocacy. They must realise that FGM is a crime, it is a crime, and it cannot continue. And if they don’t want to act with us, they are  siding with th e cutters. Because if they don’t act with us, it is because they accept , or  they agree with this practice. If they  don’t agree with FGM and forced marriage, they must a ct n ow, not tomorrow, it is now they must act. If they don’t act, they side with the  cutters.   And another message for survivors. Please survivors, we need you to speak louder. Because by speaking louder, you will give the courage to other   survivors to  talk about their story. It will give  courage to other survivors to change their life. You  will give courage to other survivors to become change makers, to become activists , t o say ‘no, I do not a ccept being the slave of society , or the slave of a man’. You can give courage to other girls  to say ‘I can become a change maker, I can become a leader, I can change the world for me, for my community, and for all the girls and women in the world’. So please speak louder. It is your right to take  power o ver your life and nobody can decide for you what you have to do with your body, with your sexuality, and with your life. You are great, you are great. So let the world know that you are great. You are great.   CJLPA : That was so beautifully and powerfully phrased. Thank you very much for saying all of that and for your time today. Thank you so much for your time today. It is truly an honour and very helpful to have you here.   MK : Thank you very much Nadia. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024. [1] See ‘FGM in the Americas’ ( Equality Now ) < https://equalitynow.org/fgm_in_the_americas/ > accessed 10 January 2024.

Clive Stafford Smith is a British human rights lawyer who has spent his career working against the death penalty in the United States, along with representing more than 80 Guantanamo Bay detainees. He is also co-founder of Reprieve, an NGO that challenges human rights abuses in the courts of law around the world. This interview was conducted in two parts: the first written, the second recorded. Whilst the whole interview is reproduced below, the video includes only the second half. CJLPA : We are pleased to welcome you today, Mr Clive Stafford Smith, to interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art . You have devoted an inspiring career as a human rights defence lawyer, having represented over 300 prisoners facing the death penalty in the Southern United States. You are also co-founder of Reprieve, a human rights not-for-profit organization, and more recently a newer non-profit called 3D Centre. In addition to this, what we would like to focus on in our interview today is your work at Guantanamo Bay, where you volunteered your legal services in 2002 and have since helped secure the release of over 80 detainees.   You opened up your book Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay And The Secret Prisons  in a manner that I think truly sets the scene. Particularly, your imagery of an iguana at the US base in Cuba. Can you briefly explain the difference between an iguana’s rights and the Guantanamo detainee’s rights?   Clive Stafford Smith : We figured out that the environmental laws applied in Gitmo even though the US government said the Constitution didn’t. This set up the nice paradox that if you kick an iguana you might get 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but if I kick you—assuming you are not an American—nothing happens. So we claimed in the US Supreme Court that if our clients had ‘equal rights with iguanas’ it would be a step up.   CJLPA : Before the Guantanamo cases, you dedicated your life’s work to defending prisoners on Death Row. Reflecting back, how would you compare the experience in defending clients from capital punishment compared to defending clients at Guantanamo?   CSS : It is very similar. The point of the death penalty is that the US faces a very real societal problem—a high murder rate, often precipitated by drugs and alcohol, always committed with guns, largely by society’s disenfranchised. The obvious way to address this is to vastly improve education, have a better approach to drugs, ban guns, and create a meaningful welfare system. That is expensive and long term. So the chosen political ‘solution’ is to blame a small number of young black men, and execute them, as if that will solve anything. With Gitmo, we had a large and expanding group of people who hated us, largely because their dubious leaders blamed us for every ill. In turn, we thought the best way to address the patent inequities in the world was to pretend that all these ills were caused by Muslim extremism and to say that if we punish 780 fairly random bearded Muslim men we would be able to say we had taken action.   CJLPA : Were there any similarities in the legal procedure and what were the main differences worth noting?   CSS : Ironically, the reason the best lawyers in Gitmo were death penalty lawyers from the state courts (not the federal) is because they were the people who understood political cases. It is not about the legal procedure (which is hopeless in both fora) but about bringing power to powerless people.   CJLPA : It would be interesting to get your view on the psychology of Guantanamo, to better synthesize how and why the US was capable of kidnapping innocent men and locking them away for years without a charge or trial. In your opinion, what is it about ‘terrorism’ that brings it to a whole other league where justice and the rule of law are merely a memory? Even the Nazis, the spies from the Soviet Union sharing secrets about a nuclear holocaust, were given a trial.   CSS : It is ironic that in what was touted as a war to protect democracy and the rule of law the law was the first casualty. But then it does tend to come back to whether we respond with any good sense, or simply to convince a gullible domestic audience that we are doing something. In this case, there is the added factor that the US is just not attuned to being attacked. The US was not—thankfully!—used to being attacked. Our territory has really been attacked on three occasions: 1812, 7 December 1941, and 11 September 2001. Terrorism is just a word we use when people have complaints that, while sometimes justified, the powers that be do not wish to recognize.   CJLPA : Even before the legal questions eventually went before the Supreme Court about constitutional rights, habeas corpus, or due process, the first challenge was knowing who was captured. You were one of the first lawyers that got involved in fighting for the detainees at Guantanamo and took on the crucial role of identifying clients. Can you explain how you did this?   CSS : There were three of us who brought Rasul v. Bush  and we divided up responsibility: Joe Margulies was essentially in charge of researching law; Mike Ratner was building a coalition of lawyers, and I took on identifying the prisoners and getting permission to represent them (as we could not get to them, we needed a ‘next friend’, who would normally be a family member).   It was not until 2006 that we finally got a list of the prisoners. Until that point, for over 4 years, who was in Gitmo was classified. I was building a list from the start, from media reports of missing people around the world. Unsurprisingly it was very inaccurate.   In Yemen, for example, the per capita national income was then $300 a year. If they wanted to hire a US lawyer for $1500 an hour, if they didn’t eat all year they could get just 12 minutes. So we needed to let people know we would do it for nothing.   So I would go to each country, hold a press conference, and say that I was there to provide free representation. People would come forward to a designated hotel, and I would get them to sign authorizations.   The main thing was to say sorry. I did a lot of that.   CJLPA : Despite the fact that the US did not allow any spot of dignity for the detainees, you still found loopholes around this. I particularly like your idea with Binyam Mohamed, when he asked you for a number ten shirt from the Dutch football team. Can you briefly explain the idea behind this?   CSS : So the Military Commission was just a kangaroo court, not worthy of us taking it seriously. Rather than that we just illustrated its folly. And it kept Binyam amused, as he had a great sense of humour. The rules said you could not dress your client in Orange (that would look like the dreadful early photos), but you could dress him in ‘Culturally Sensitive Attire’ (which was meant to make us look like we were being culturally sensitive). Obviously the answer was to find something that was cultural but orange, so Binyam chose the Dutch No 10 shirt since he was the tenth person in the Commissions (or Con-missions as he rightly called them).   CJLPA : Last time I spoke to you, you told me about the story that you would tell the detainees to make them understand what the Americans were doing, the story of the Br’er Rabbit. Can you briefly explain it and why you told the detainees this story?   CSS : If you say please don’t do something they would always do it. And so I explained to everyone the old story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar patch where he got caught by Brer Fox and his Tar Baby. Br’er Rabbit is the small clever slightly arrogant rabbit (us), and Br’er Fox is the big stupid animal representing the US government. So Br’er Rabbit said ‘Please don’t throw me into the Briar patch’ because he wants the Fox to do just that. That is often what we wanted too, and the US government almost always fell for it. So I told the story in English, French and my execrable Italian (to some Libyans who spoke it—I could not remember the word for Rabbit) and that went around the Base. It came back later that the authorities thought there was some escape plan code named Rabbit…   CJLPA : I want to continue by discussing the aftermath of Guantanamo. The tragedy extends beyond the release of detainees. The US initially labelled Guantanamo detainees as the most dangerous terrorists globally and then expected other countries, each with their own political agendas, to accept these men as refugees. Can you shed light on some of the difficulties your clients have faced since their release? Additionally, how are they attempting to reinvent themselves?   CSS : It’s important to stress that the predicament of Guantanamo detainees didn’t cease with their release. The US government not only released them, branding them as the most dangerous terrorists globally but also attempted to link them back to their alleged crimes upon release. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, for instance. When he was sent back to Britain, authorities handed a secret document to the BBC, containing information extracted through torture. During an interview with Mohamed, a BBC journalist pulled out this document and began questioning him based on it. It was only because I was present there and had seen that document in secret before that we were able to stop it, because it was nothing but false evidence obtained through torture.   Moreover, they systematically sent people to countries where they had no connection. Mohamed El Gorani, for example, was a young kid of only 14 when he was taken to Guantanamo. He was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, but his family originally hailed from Chad. The US sent him back to Chad, a place he had never been to, in the middle of nowhere. The authorities in Chad aren’t known for being enlightened, and he had no support there. In addition, I’m going to be in Dubai in a couple of weeks. Many prisoners were sent to Dubai, where they were subjected to treatment worse than what they experienced in Guantanamo.   While some countries have been more reasonable, the overall assistance people received in reintegrating into society has been minimal. For instance, if you know someone with just $3,000, like Ahmed Rabbani, who is attempting to open his Guantanamo restaurant in Karachi, it’s a daunting task as he lacks the necessary funds. We managed to raise some funds for him to provide a roof over his head, but he has had his entire life taken away from him.   CJLPA : I also want to ask you about the labelling of terrorism because, in fact, most of them were not charged with terrorism.   CSS : In the case of Guantanamo detainees, only one was charged with terrorism, and there was no official charge of ‘conspiracy to commit terrorism’ due to a lack of appropriate legal grounds. Instead, detainees were often charged with other offences. The term ‘terrorism’ is indeed used broadly and sometimes controversially. Various countries apply it differently, leading to diverse interpretations. For example, Israelis label every member of Hamas as terrorists, and some British people refer to the Irish as terrorists. So all sorts of countries are doing it. Pakistan indicted Imran Khan as a terrorist. Imran Khan reached the age of 70, without a traffic ticket and suddenly he’s got 200 Federal criminal charges against him, including terrorism. So you know, this is just a stupid word that’s used to try to make people blind to the realities of what’s going on.   CJLPA : Moving a bit away from that, but focusing on the definition of terrorism: it’s a term that people have attempted to define in various countries over the years and have consistently failed, leading to constant amendments. Yet there’s always this push because, nonetheless, there’s a sense of needing to justify that it is an entirely different crime, different from murder, for instance. For example, that the victim in terrorism is not the victim; they’re merely an instrument of instilling fear among the public, or that it’s about sending a political message, and these features are what supposedly differentiate it. What’s your outlook on having a separate definition of terrorism? Do you think it makes sense? And how does having that charge in itself affect obstruction of justice?   CSS : There’s more than just the word terrorism, there are effectively two words beginning with ‘T’ that are used to blind everyone in this whole debate. One is Terrorism, and the other is Torture. So there’s a whole debate about whether what happened to my clients was torture. I don’t care if was torture. You know, we’re looking at this in such a foolish way. There was a time when we thought that just being unpleasant to someone was bad. Certainly, if you have a suspect, and you slap your suspect, that’s not good. But it’s not torture. So suddenly, the debate has become about whether these people a) are terrorists, and b) whether we’re torturing, which is just a totally fatuous debate. Because it’s acting as if treating people badly is acceptable, as long as it falls short of torture. So, you know, I don’t like any of this discussion. I think it just blinds people to any sensible debate.   CJLPA : And I wanted to ask you about any accountability that has happened sense, which I know is minimal. But did any of the detainees receive compensation from the US government for the wrongful detention and acts of torture?   CSS : What do you think? No, of course not. They haven’t received an apology let alone compensation. No one’s admitted that anything was done wrong. Now, we got compensation for some prisoners, but never from the Americans. We got it from the British government for their complicity in what the Americans did. The Canadians had to pay Omar Khadr for their complicity. Then there was the only really successful litigation in America, to get compensation from the two psychologists who came up with this whole thing. They were paid $81 million to come up with a method of abusing prisoners. And so they were sued because they didn’t have sovereign immunity, they didn’t have the defences that the US has created for itself. But of course, their contract with the US included the fact that the US would indemnify them for anything that they might lose through being sued. So neither of those two doctors actually lost anything their lawyers were paid for, and all their costs were paid. And so in that small way, I suppose the US had to pay a small amount of money. And we’re about to do it again, on behalf of Abu Zubaydah, I hope. But the short answer is no. The US has wasted millions and millions of dollars, by now it’s over billions of dollars, on Guantanamo. But they certainly have done absolutely nothing to ensure that the people that they mistreated so badly would not become vehement enemies of America.   CJLPA : Following on that, are there any legal recourse or legal actions that have been in motion since their release? Either for the detainees, or in the sense of the misinformation that was released to the public at the time about how they were labelling them as terrorists?   CSS : The only way to get accurate information out to people is for us to do it. And then the media has been woeful in this regard. You look at the New York Times . On their website, they have been on the Guantanamo docket. The Guantanamo docket was leaked by WikiLeaks. And I ended up testifying in Julian Assange’s hearings in the UK on that particular subject, because I would perfectly willingly believe that the US intentionally leaked that themselves, because that isn’t the information I get to see. I was all excited when I heard that WikiLeaks had leaked secret documents from Guantanamo Bay, because I thought you were going to get to see what I got to see. But that’s not true at all.   What they leaked was the very, very minimal documents that the US government comes out with on each prisoner. And it is effectively the wet dreams of the torturers that they thought were true. And there’s a lot I can’t talk about that because it’s secret, and I can’t tell you or I have to kill you. And that’s quite hard to do over Zoom, so I’m constrained. So, the one thing I can tell you is one case in which I got everything declassified, just to illustrate. So it’s the case of Younous Chekkouri. And with him, there was a 13-page document about what an evil wicked terrorist he was. And when I litigated that in Federal Court, we had 1811 pages, proving all of that was total bullshit (I think that’s the legal term). So for each page they had, we had about 130 pages proving it false. And you don’t get to see that. But the evidence against these guys is just such nonsense, and the media is so gullible. Just publishing that. And we ask the New York Times  to put up there, that this is not evidence, this is not true. The vast majority of this has been tortured out of people. Instead, they put one little disclaimer saying lawyers dispute whether this is true. So these men, and they’re all men, will be dogged for the rest of their lives by this sort of defamatory rubbish.   CJLPA : It’s interesting, though, because you do sometimes hear about these criminal cases where individuals got released after finding out that they’re innocent, and there is compensation sometimes in those circumstances. But in this instance, when it’s been quite clear, and it’s in public information that they have been held, without ever having been charged, without having a proper hearing, that to this day, there’s not been any sort of attention to it.   CSS : There’s not been a single instance, in which the US has admitted they made a mistake. You know, to begin with, when they released someone they had all six of the secret agencies saying that this person was no threat. And to begin with, for a little while, they said that you’d been cleared. But they suddenly realized what that sounded like. So instead, they changed the verbiage to say that ‘you have been found to be no longer a threat to the US or as coalition allies’. So they use that language just so they never, ever have to say the words ‘I’m sorry’. Which is ironic as all these Republicans who are so incredibly high on taking responsibility for your mistakes, and want to punish people who do make mistakes, are surely the very last people who are ever going to admit that they made a mistake.   CJLPA :  Both political parties, Republican and Democrat, and I think that’s what makes it so disappointing with the Democrats as well.   CSS : Totally. I mean, Obama said he’s getting rid of Guantanamo and torture. Never did get rid of Guantanamo, but instead he created assassination. So instead of having detention without trial, we have the death penalty without trial, which is obviously even worse.   CJLPA : In light of this, where does international law come into play? Is this an indication of international law’s weakness? Or merely one of the circumstances where it has failed? What is your perspective on that? Specifically, as well, I know that the US has not signed too many treaties in this respect.   CSS : How many treaties has the US signed that are enforceable against us? Human rights treaties? Zero. There’s not a single one. There used to be one, which was the United Nations Treaty on Consular Relations. But we’ve withdrawn from the enforceability clause of that. So there’s now none. So international law is of no relevance to the people in Guantanamo Bay at all. And it’s a great tragedy, because one day the US will need  international law. When China is top dog, and the US is complaining about their rights being trampled on, they’re going to say, well, I wish when we were top dog, we’d signed up to all this stuff and enforced it. But they won’t, because they’re willing to enforce it against, you know, maybe a few dictators from Africa, but they’re not willing to have it done to any Americans. So as a consequence, it has no relevance to what we do at all.   CJLPA : But also, more broadly, not in the sense of treaties, but just international law in the sense of war crimes. How is this any different than when you’re at war, and then you’re taking people against their will and detaining them, and there’s no trial, and there’s torture. I mean, it’s what’s currently happening in the world, where we are claiming war crimes, and the UN is speaking up. But in this instance, there’s still to this day, nothing said about it.   CSS : Well, there’s a lot said about it, actually. But it’s all said in exactly the opposite way that we would like. What we have done has licensed a bunch of repressive regimes to do the same thing. And you know, how many times have you seen in Syria or wherever that some group of people that we don’t like would dress up the prisoners they had in Guantanamo orange outfits, and just say that they were doing the same as Guantanamo. So, you know, in terms of humanitarian law and practice, what we did in Guantanamo set us back decades. And it’s such a shame because in the early days when I still thought the law was vaguely relevant to Guantanamo, I did a lot of work on the Nuremberg tribunals, where the bad guys were really the British. Because Winston Churchill said, ‘let’s just kill 10,000 Nazis’. And Stalin said, ‘Oh, let’s give a trial, a Stalinist trial to 10,000 Nazis and then kill them’. And it was only the Americans who insisted on due process to the extent that a very limited number of people were hanged, and 30% of the people were acquitted, which was really a credit to the US. But we’ve thrown all of that away, which is really a shame.   CJLPA : My next question is in light of what we’ve just been discussing about the crimes that are committed and how the government is abusing their power, in the name of national security. Why do you think we still have laws that give the executive the power to abuse human rights in the name of national security?   CSS : Well, I don’t think we really do have laws that give them the power to do it. It’s just they do it and no one is able to stop them. And it’s really interesting. I’m teaching a course at Bristol University this year. And one of the first things, it’s about the US Constitution, and it’s about actually how wonderful the US Constitution is compared to anything the British have. The British legal system is abysmal compared to what we have. Britain has Belmarsh. Belmarsh is very, very active. Britain has its own secret courts, which are way worse than the American secret courts, on account of the special advocate. If you’re a terrorist, and they want to use secret evidence against you in Britain, they appoint you a barrister who you get to meet now before you know any of the evidence, and then after that, when your barrister gets to see the evidence, the barrister can never talk to you again. So this person is meant to be representing your interests and is not allowed to even talk to you. You know, at least in Guantanamo, we’re trusted to see secret evidence and not reveal it to the client unless we have gone through steps to make it possible. And, you know, obviously, we obey that because I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them not to listen in on everything we do.   CJLPA : Is that just what happens? Or is that what’s permitted? For instance, under the Terrorism Act?   CSS : That’s the rules they come up with. But the British are so pusillanimous that they don’t challenge it. I met with them when this was first put up and I said, you’ve got to do what we’ve done in Guantanamo, which is we don’t take part in a system that’s that rotten. We challenge everything about it. But instead, now they go along with it. These are all the people who probably went to the same private school that I did. And so the British system is vastly worse. The American system, at least we sued them. We won in the US Supreme Court. We got access to them. We set up a structure that’s far from perfect, but it’s resulted in the release of 96% of the people so far. So, you know, that’s vastly better than Britain.   But most of that has to do not  with the law. The law has been important just to get in there. But of the 750 people who are no longer in Guantanamo, the courts have ordered the release of one. That was Asadullah Harun, who was coincidentally my client. But the other 749 are no longer there because of the Court of Public Opinion. And that’s about going in there, getting the truth out, and then publishing it to the world, which we do all the time, and it’s a battle because they try to make it all secret. But in Britain, you wouldn’t get it, no one does that. They just have a secret little hearing that the prisoners are not allowed to be at. And then they sentence the prisoner to years and years in Belmarsh. It’s dreadful.   CJLPA : What is the role of the judges regarding Guantanamo? How involved were they with the executive? Were they just interpreting cases and making their decisions in order to make sure that they were appeasing those in power?   CSS : I don’t care what the judge is doing in Guantanamo. The judge is totally irrelevant to the system. You know, when you’re in a kangaroo court, the only thing you can do is get out of that court. So I’m not the least bit interested in anything they do, I’m interested in releasing and reducing them to a laughingstock. That’s what we did in Binyam Mohamed’s case: we just took their rules, I gave a copy to Binyam, he had a wonderful sense of humour and just took the piss out of them. And then I reported myself to the Bar Association in this case, because it was unethical for me to follow their rules. And I did that just to get out of their little kangaroo court. Even if it meant that I was in a court in America, at least that was likely to be more fair. So the person who’s the judge in the commission is just a puppet of the government and should be ignored at every level.   CJLPA : In the present day, where are we left with Guantanamo Bay and the detention centre? Is it a matter of individually getting the clients out?   CSS : Individually we got of most of them, and we’ll get a whole bunch more out in the next few days. And then the end, there’ll be 10 people left in Guantanamo. And those will be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his mates; probably most of them were involved in some way in 9/11. So, what you’ve got is a capital murder of 3,000 people, and they’re not going to get the death penalty against him. And that’s extraordinary. This illustrates how totally pointless their whole process is that in the worst crime ever committed against the US, they’re going to lose. And that’s not because of the Commissions or the courts or anyone, it’s because of what we did, it’s because we tortured people, and we went so far astray. So in the end, there will be ten poor guys stuck in Guantanamo forever. And you know, they’ll end up dying of old age there, which is not a great thing, I suppose. But it’s a lot better than what would have happened to them if they’d been in a real court.   CJLPA : And finally, what do you think is the legacy of Guantanamo Bay? Do you think the world’s learned from these horrifying events and the world is moving in a better direction in the name of human rights?   CSS : No. I wrote a piece that was for Al Jazeera  a while back about taking my grandson on a tour of the Guantanamo Bay Injustice Museum. I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. I hope so. One of the very first times I ever went to Guantanamo would be almost 20 years ago now. The nice sergeant who was showing us around was talking about how he wanted to close it down as a military base and open it up as a tourist destination. You know, it’s got an airport, it’s got lots of very secure hotel rooms, it’s got a McDonald’s, it’s got the Guantanamo Golf Course on Recreation Road, it’d be fabulous. And I thought, yeah, it’d be great. And we’ll have a museum to human folly and injustice. I hope that does happen one day. I hope we give it back to Cuba. And I hope Cuba turns it into something like that. I think the chances of that happening are fairly slim. But it’s what should happen.   CJLPA : This has been an absolutely fascinating discussion. Thank you Clive for taking the time to speak with us today, to help spread knowledge and insight about the ongoing violations happening at Guantanamo Bay. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024.

My Story   Ten years old and wishing I was dead. Sitting on my bed, staring at my hand—wondering whether I was invisible or not. I never want another child to feel invisible, worthless, and so terrorised that they can’t swallow. So filled with fear that their very breath feels choked and smothered. Let me take you on a journey back 50 years, to my childhood.   My mum had run away from her Mafia boyfriend, a Greek man who was already married. Upon hearing my mum was pregnant, he took out a gun and put it to her stomach, saying: ‘Get rid of the baby or I will kill you both’. There was no fairy-tale ending, as my mum had hoped, of him leaving his wife, marriage, and having a baby together. There was only the stark reality of running in fear—homeless, with no money and no work. My mum ended up living in a homeless shelter in the UK, traumatised and addicted to alcohol. I was born two months early. As my mum couldn’t look after me, I went to live with an aunt. In the meantime, my mum met a smooth-talking man in a pub who groomed her, said he loved her and asked her to marry him. She did marry him, and when I was two she took me back and I lived with them.   My stepdad was evil; he was an alcoholic and a psychopath. He had severe mental illness and hated me with every fibre of his being. He was obsessively jealous and saw me as a part of the man who my mum first loved. Life as a child was hell on earth. My stepdad was drunk and aggressive daily and beat my mum most weeks. I saw her kicked, punched, stabbed, screamed at, and constantly verbally and emotionally abused. My stepdad would chase her down our street with a knife and punch her in front of the neighbours; yet not one person stepped in to help. The attitude was to turn a blind eye and not interfere with the business of others.

The book is a simple yet complex idea that has profound influence on culture, society, and religion that transcends time and civilization. The book is a platform or foundation for the study of the Humanities because it has so much power over the course of human life. The impact of books and the knowledge contained dictates human history, influences religious and political policy, supports the powerful, and inspires the repressed. In early book creation the relationship between word and image was essential. The word spoke to the privileged, the educated and the image informed the poor and illiterate, yet both groups needed books to guide their lives.   I grew up with books; my mother was a voracious reader and raised her children to cherish books. The book is a living memoir, a repository of memory and meaning that goes beyond the story that lies within. My work captures the physical body of the book as if it is a living figure with a spine, the leather cover is skin, and the pages flesh. The physical traits reflect the life of the book, both good and bad, exposing bumps, bruises, withering age, or a child's scribble. How often have you found a special memento in the pages of a book that floods your senses with memories?