Human Rights Glance
The UK has settled out of court by paying a “substantial sum” to a Guantánamo Bay detainee who was suing the government for its alleged complicity in his rendition and torture, according to the inmate’s legal team.
Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah have accused the British intelligence services of providing questions to his CIA interrogators to put to him while they were torturing him at a string of CIA “black sites” around the world where he was held between 2002 and 2006.
They claim that the case has relevant lessons for the UK today, highlighting the legal and moral risks involved in cooperation with the US at a time it is violating international law.
Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, is a stateless Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was one of the first detainees in the US “war on terror” to be tortured, and was subjected to a full range of what the Bush administration at the time termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in secret prisons in Thailand, Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan, Morocco, and then the US base at Guantánamo Bay, on Cuba’s southern coast.
Now 54, he has been held in Guantánamo Bay without charge ever since, becoming one of its “forever prisoners”.
A Maryland woman has been released and reunited with her family after spending 25 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody – despite her attorneys saying documentation showed she was born in the US and therefore is a citizen.
Three Israelis were arrested after settlers wounded at least two people and set fire to cars at a Palestinian factory near Nablus in the West Bank earlier today, according to Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Israeli forces clashed Tuesday with students during a raid at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in what the military said was an operation aimed at disrupting a pro-terror gathering.
The Department of Homeland Security has launched an immigration and fraud crackdown in Minneapolis amid a welfare-abuse scandal in Minnesota.
Israeli occupation forces carried out a series of invasions, abductions, and movement restrictions across the occupied West Bank on Sunday, targeting communities in Salfit in the central West Bank, Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, Ramallah in the central West Bank, Nablus in the northern West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.
Thousands of tents supplied by China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to shelter displaced Palestinians in Gaza offer only limited protection against rain and wind, an assessment compiled by shelter specialists in the devastated territory has revealed.
