Thirty Muslim men remain detained as the Guantanamo Bay prison enters its 23rd year of operation. Sixteen have long been cleared, some for as long as twenty years, while billions have been spent keeping them there. Why is Guantanamo still open? Will the Biden administration fulfill its goal of closing the prison? What can we do?
Join us for a virtual conversation with the former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, a Guantanamo survivor, and experts from Amnesty International USA and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Panelists will discuss the current status of the prison, the conditions faced by men who have been released, and where we go from here.
Moderator–Rich Sroczynski, Close Guantanamo Coalition
Presenters:
Fionnuala Ni Aolain, former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, was, in 2023, the first official UN expert to visit and investigate Guantanamo. She extensively interviewed present and former detainees, and individuals and groups in the US and abroad focusing on the
rights of families of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks victims, the rights of detainees at the Guantánamo detention facility, and the rights of former detainees. She and her team produced a comprehensive report https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/terrorism/sr/2023-06-26-SR-terrorism-technical-visit-US-guantanamo-detention-facility.pdf enumerating numerous human rights failures in all areas and providing recommendations.
Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and a former Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. He was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of a suspected terrorist. Today, Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and an indefatigable advocate for his brother present and former detainees with work published in the New York Times and elsewhere. His memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, was published in 2021.
Daphne Eviatar directs Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights program. She leads the organization’s advocacy related to US national security policy, focusing on detention, interrogation and use of lethal force. She was previously Senior Counsel at Human Rights First and is a former journalist.
Aliya Hana Hussain is an Advocacy Program Manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), where she manages CCR’s advocacy and campaigns on indefinite detention at Guantanamo, the profiling and targeting of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, and accountability for torture and other war crimes. Since the prison opened in 2002, CCR has challenged unjust detentions at Guantanamo and represented dozens of men detained there.
Co-sponsors: Amnesty International USA, Center for Constitutional Rights, Massachusetts Peace Action, Kairos Community, Upper Hudson Peace Action, Witness Against Torture, World Can’t Wait, Center for Victims of Torture, September 11 Families For Peceful Tomorrows, World Can’t Wait
