Demonstration - Shut Guantanamo: end 10 years of shame
Posted: 13 January 2012
Edinburgh campaigners take to the streets this weekend to demand closure of US detention centre
Where: Register House, corner of Princes Street and North Bridge When: Saturday 14 January, 12.00pm - 3.00pm
Local Amnesty campaigners will take to the streets tomorrow (Saturday 14 January) to highlight 10 years of human rights abuses perpetrated at the Guantánamo Bay camp and ask the public to sign a petition calling on Barak Obama to close Guantánamo by ending indefinite detentions.
Members of the Edinburgh University Amnesty Society and St Marks Amnesty local group will don orange boiler suits, which have come to symbolise this aberration of human rights around the world, and call for the immediate release of British national Shaker Aamer and closure of the facility.
This week marks the tenth Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, where 171 men are still being held, despite President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by 22 January 2010. Of these, at least 12 were in the original group first transferred to Guantánamo on 11 January 2002. One of them is serving a life sentence after being convicted by a military commission in 2008. None of the other 11 has been charged.
One of the 167 still held without a trial is the former UK resident Shaker Aamer, a 43-year-old father-of-four whose family live in south London. Mr Aamer, who has been held at Guantánamo since February 2002, is originally from Saudi Arabia but is married to a British citizen and has four British children. Mr Aamer had permission to live in the UK when he was detained in Afghanistan by Afghan forces in the autumn of 2001 (among other places, he was held at the notorious US military prison at Bagram). He was subsequently transferred to US custody in Afghanistan and later taken to Guantánamo.
To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International released a 64-page report, “Guantánamo: A Decade of Damage to Human Rights”, highlighting the unlawful treatment of Guantánamo detainees and outlines reasons why the detention centre continues to represent an attack on human rights.
Laura Shepherd, Chair of the Edinburgh University Amnesty Society, said:
"It is appalling that ten years on and we are still calling on the US government to close Guantanamo. Kidnapping and imprisoning people indefinitely without charge or trial, denying them their freedom and human rights, gratuitously denigrating and abusing them physically and mentally - all of this needs to end and it needs to end now.
"By signing the petition you are saying that this violation of human rights and international law has to stop, for Shaker Aamer, his family, and the families of all other detainees."
In ten years, only one of the 779 detainees held at the base has been transferred to the USA for prosecution in an ordinary federal court. Others have faced unfair trials by military commission. The administration is currently intending to seek the death penalty against six of the detainees at such trials.
Current Guantánamo detainees include those who were subjected to torture and enforced disappearance prior to being transferred to the camp. There has been little or no accountability for these crimes under international law committed in a programme of secret detention operated under US presidential authority. Instead, the US government has systematically blocked attempts by former detainees to seek redress for such violations.
The Obama administration has blamed its failure to close the Guantánamo detention facility on Congress, which has indeed failed to ensure US compliance with international human rights principles in this context.
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