Preventing torture within the fight against terrorism

NEWSLETTER

Framing the Issue

Preventing Torture within the fight against terrorism December 2010 — Volume 4, Issue 3

Inside this issue:

‘War on terror’: the legacy

War on terror: the legacy

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was billed as central to the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Now, as US troops officially end ‘combat operations’ (yet retain a significant presence in the country) it is time to take stock both of torture as a legacy of the invasion and subsequent occupation on Iraq, as well the legacy of torture within the ‘War on Terror’.

Terror’ – namely that the torture has made it harder to convict terror suspects in the United States. A recent report from ProPublica and the National Law Journal revealed that the US government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. Thus, as ProPublica author Chisun Lee makes clear, not only is torture illegal and immoral, but, it makes convictions harder.

Our main story highlights a key legacy of torture in the ‘War on

Yet torture within and resulting from the ‘War on Terror’ is not

By Scott McAusland

limited to the well known abuse of prisoners at now-notorious facilities including Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. The tentacles of torture have reached much further – including deep into many layers of Iraqi society.

As US troops cease regular patrols Paul Canning of LGBT Asylum News reports on the shocking increase in the torture and murder of members of Iraq’s sexual minorities – which the author asserts to be a direct result of the US-led invasion and occupation. We also highlight a report from Amnesty Internatio-

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US judges reject interrogation evidence in 2 Guantánamo cases The pogrom of gays in Iraq 5 Tens of thousands of detainees at risk of torture in 7 Iraq, following US handover

nal on the staggering figure of 30,000 prisoners, still awaiting trial, who are at risk of torture and ill-treatment in the country.

Photo by: 4WardEver UK / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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US judges reject interrogation evidence in Guantánamo cases military hearings, which the judge viewed as less intimidating than the interrogations he found unacceptable.

The 15 decisions offer the most detailed accounting to date of how information obtained from the Guantánamo inmates through controversial tactics is standing up in court. They come in cases initiated by detainees seeking release via a writ of habeas corpus, not cherrypicked by prosecutors. Criminal law experts say the judges' opinions help explain why the government has decided not to pursue criminal convictions against some detainees. Such evidence would pose even greater problems in criminal trials, for which requirements of proof are more demanding.

The Obama administration has already said that at least 48 of the remaining 176 prisoners at Guantánamo will be held indefinitely because they're too dangerous to release but can't be prosecuted successfully in military or civilian court. They've said that coercion-tainted evidence is one obstacle.

Photo by: Peter Burgess / CC 2.0

By Chisun Lee The government's case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.

But a federal judge rejected Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah's confessions, concluding that he had concocted them under intense coercion. Even statements that the government insisted Al Rabiah had made under noncoercive, or "clean," questioning were tainted, U.S. District Judge Colleen KollarKotelly ruled, and she ordered that Al Rabiah be released.

The government has lost eight

of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated, according to ProPublica's review of 31 published decisions that resolve lawsuits filed by 52 captives who said they've been wrongfully detained.Because some of the judges' opinions are heavily

Guantánamo inmates the green light to challenge their detention in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Judges rejected government evidence because of interrogation tactics ranging from verbal threats to physical abuse they called torture. Even in the seven

The language of the documents might be interpreted as suggesting that the CIA engaged in this research to avoid harming the detainees, to keep the inter-rogations “safe and ethical.” This was far from the truth. redacted, it's impossible to be sure there aren't more cases in which the government offered interrogation evidence collected under questionable circumstances. More than 50 such lawsuits are still pending, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court gave

cases the government won, the judges didn't endorse aggressive methods. In six, they decided the detainees' stories of abuse simply weren't credible or were irrelevant to the outcome. In one, the prisoner had repeated self-incriminating statements in

In most of the cases the government lost, the judges rejected statements even from the "clean" sessions that the Bush administration began administering in 2002 to collect evidence to use in court. The fear prisoners experienced during improper interrogations bled over to corrupt those statements too, the judges said. In Al Rabiah's case, Kollar-Kotelly found that interrogators fed him incriminating details "that the Government has not even attempted to rely on as reliable or credible," including a story of his handing Osama bin Laden "a suitcase full of money." Then interrogators used "abusive techniques," such as sleep deprivation, threats of torture and other methods described in redacted passages, to get him to admit to them. Al Rabiah is now free in his home country, Kuwait.

"We thought all along that this could happen," said Brittain

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Mallow, the former commander of the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force, who supervised the clean interviews from 2002 to 2005.

"There was no question in our minds that that would be a defense strategy, to say, 'This person was treated badly, and you can't trust anything he told anyone.' But we didn't control all the interviews of the detainees, so what we could do was limited."

Where the judges draw the line for acceptable tactics affects how interrogators question U.S. prisoners in ongoing hostilities, said Robert Chesney, a former adviser to President Barack Obama's Detainee Policy Task Force. In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied U.S. captives in Afghanistan the same right to legal review as the Guantánamo detainees, but after three prisoners sought a rehearing, the court this month ruled that they could present new evidence in a lower court to continue fighting their detention.

"You have to assume that, if you're in charge of a detention facility, you're operating in the shadow of these rulings," said Chesney, who teaches national security law at the University of Texas School of Law.

Photo by: The US Army @ Flickr / CC 2.0

No do-overs The government is borrowing its clean-evidence approach from criminal law, by which prosecutors occasionally succeed in arguing that a change in time, scene or interrogator has reduced a suspect's fears enough that a court should accept his subsequent words as voluntary and true.

"I'm not aware of a single case that doesn't rely extensively on statements of detainees," said Philip Sundel, deputy chief defense counsel in the Defense Department's Office of Military Commissions. An administration review recently obtained by The Washington Post supports his assessment: "Much of what is known about such detainees comes from their own statements or statements made by other detainees during custodial debriefings."

But almost no change has been enough to convince judges that the unusual pressures experienced by the Guantánamo inmates had been eased. Many of the detainees were aggressively interrogated at foreign prisons.

Once at Guantánamo, each captive was questioned "dozens of times, over the course of weeks and months, by different entities, different persons, different interviewers, sometimes for completely different purposes and with different kinds of questions," Mallow said. Driven to get actionable intelligence, some interrogators used now widely criticized tactics such as prolonged sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions, threats with military dogs and, as Mallow put it, "experimentation and ad hoc methodologies."

At this point, the government has lost 37 of the 53 habeas cases that have been decided, most because it couldn't produce enough reliable evidence that the men were al-Qaida or Taliban militants.

In the 15 decisions ProPublica reviewed, only once did the government succeed in persuading a judge that the taint of coercion had been removed from specific pieces of evidence.

Moving detainees from harsh

Lawyers familiar with the Guantánamo case files expect many of the remaining habeas cases will also turn on judges' assessments of interrogation evidence.

prisons abroad to Guantánamo didn't work, nor did sending in cordial interviewers rather than aggressive interrogators. In some cases, judges still saw taint in "clean" statements taken months or even years after coercive interrogations.

Last year, Justice Department lawyers tried to show that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed [was an al-Qaida fighter by using statements from another detainee, Binyam Mohamed, whose "harrowing" interrogation ordeal was described in an 81-page opinion by Senior Judge Gladys Kessler. For two years, beginning with his capture in April 2002, foreign interrogators holding him "at the behest of the United States" beat and kicked him, chained him to a wall, kept him half-standing for long stretches and cut him with a blade, including on his genitals. He was "fed information" and "told to verify it." During that time, he was also interrogated by the FBI and CIA. The government's lawyers didn't contest the allegations of mistreatment but instead argued that the treatment of the informant didn't undermine the evidence he gave later. They submitted statements he'd made after being transferred to Guantánamo, where a U.S. interviewer "developed a relationship with him that was nonabusive and, in fact, cordial and cooperative."

But Kessler didn't buy that better treatment had done the trick. Given that, "throughout his detention, a constant barrage of physical and psychological abuse was employed in order to manipulate him and program him into telling investigators what they wanted to hear," she wrote, it was "more than plausible" that he had also manufactured details in nonabusive questioning.

Had Binyam Mohamed's statements been clean, Kessler suggested, they would have made all the difference in the case against the other detainee, who according to other, reliable evidence had some tie to "a terrorist pipeline." Instead, Kessler ordered in November that Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed be released. The government is appealing her decision.

Binyam Mohamed, the informant whose torture Kessler described so vividly, had already been released. He's now free in Britain, where he has mounted a public campaign to have the British officers he claims were complicit in his torture held accountable.

The U.S. government's bid to block Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim's habeas lawsuit met a similar fate. He had confessed to receiving military training from al-Qaida, but later said he'd made up the story in fear of punishment.

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Government lawyers didn't contest that Hatim, while held for six months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, had been beaten repeatedly, kicked and "threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida," according to U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina's opinion.

Instead, they submitted confessions he gave after arriving at Guantánamo, under cleaner questioning. But Urbina found that Hatim's confession was "tainted by torture" and ordered that he be released. The government is appealing the decision.

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won habeas cases by alleging forced interrogations have been released, while four who lost have appealed. In at least one case, there is still time for the losing party to file an appeal.

Cleaner evidence The six cases the government has won despite a claim of coercion weren't endorsements of harsh interrogations. Rather, the judges ruled in the government's favor because they were skeptical of the detainees' claims of abuse or for other reasons.

Government lawyers scored their most direct victory in the

So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court Mallow said he never thought the clean-interrogations strategy was surefire: "Do you believe the argument that, if someone was abused as a child, they're going to be affected for the rest of their life? I think it depends on the individual. You don't have an absolute argument that after 30 days that everything you do now is completely separate and clean."

Coercion challenges and other problems with detainees' reliability were pivotal in these cases, because the government had little to show besides questionable interrogation evidence. In Al Rabiah's case, for instance, the government's other proof amounted to statements from four detainees that KollarKotelly rejected as unbelievable and even "demonstrably false."

In Hatim's case, the government's other key evidence came from a fellow prisoner who, according to the military's own evaluators, suffered "severe psychological problems," including "psychosis" and "auditory hallucinations." Other judges had already rejected evidence from that informant, Urbina noted.

The Obama administration is appealing five of the eight coercion cases it lost, all to the D.C. Circuit. Three detainees who

case of Yasein Khasem Mohammad Esmail, convincing U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy that the prisoner had invented much of his claim of mistreatment.

Esmail's lawyers had submitted three ever more elaborate accounts saying he had been threatened with death, thrown from a plane and buried to his neck in the ground, Kennedy said in his April 8 decision. To counter the detainee's claims, the government submitted medical records that undercut his story and produced sworn statements from two U.S. interrogators who denied using or witnessing most of the techniques Esmail described.

In a discussion that took up nearly half his 43-page opinion, Kennedy said he found the interrogators to be more credible than Esmail. Esmail had been "mistreated," he said, but his claims were "exaggerated."

Esmail's legal team consisted of S. William Livingston, Alan Pemberton and Brian Foster of Covington & Burling; David Remes, founder of the nonprofit Appeal for Justice; and Marc Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Remes and Falkoff declined to comment, and counsel at Co-

vington did not respond to emails.

Chesney, the University of Texas law professor, said Kennedy's decision was "a big win for the government. It shows that it is possible to rebut claims of torture, that the courts don't simply accept detainees' claims of abuse." But the judge's opinion didn't address the broader question of which interrogation methods will find acceptance in court. The judge thought Esmail was "a little bit abused," Chesney said, but not so abused as to poison the interrogation evidence. "It's bad that the courts are not speaking more clearly about where the line is.

Is it torture? Is it cruel and inhuman treatment? Is it any kind of interrogation?"

In upholding the detention of another prisoner, Omar Mohammed Khalifh, Senior Judge James Robertson, now retired, said it was unnecessary to decide whether his interrogation statements were tainted, because the government's other evidence was enough to show he was an explosives instructor for al-Qaida.

The closest the government got to erasing the taint of substantial coercion was in its victory against Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani. Senior Judge Thomas Hogan said "a variety of harsh interrogation techniques" had tainted 23 interrogation statements the government obtained from the detainee. But Hogan determined that the selfincriminating testimony the

If coerced evidence is costing the government wins in the habeas cases, criminal law experts say, it would pose worse problems if those cases were prosecuted in civilian or military courts. The rules for excluding tainted evidence are stricter in both kinds of criminal trials, yet the government's need to marshal evidence is greater. To win a habeas case it need prove only that a detainee is "more likely than not" a member of the enemy, but to win a civilian or military criminal conviction it must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

A death threat alone could undermine a prosecution, if the believability of a prisoner's statement in response to that threat was crucial to the case, said retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until November 2006 was in charge of deciding which Guantánamo detainees would face military commission trials. Altenburg is currently of counsel to Greenberg Traurig.

So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court; that case is currently unfolding in federal court in New York.

A January report by the Guantanamo Review Task Force said tainted evidence was hindering

Even if the administration doesn't prosecute any more of the Guantánamo prisoners, the legal damage caused by harsh interrogations is likely to keep emerging as their detention challenges move through court. prisoner gave during formal military hearings was clean. Two years had passed between the worst abuse and the military hearings, Hogan reasoned, and at the hearings, Al Madhwani apparently spoke voluntarily and had been able to seek help from a military-assigned "personal representative."

The criminal arena

prosecution "in some cases," but that it was not, overall, a "principal obstacle." Administration spokesmen declined to elaborate or to disclose the names of detainees who will not be tried for this reason.

The coercion issue has cropped up in a few high-profile instances. In the case of Omar Khadr, who was 15 when detained in 2002 for allegedly killing a U.S.

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Army medic in Afghanistan, the judge in his ongoing military commission trial ruled on Aug. 9 that prosecutors may use his confessions despite his claim that he spoke out of fear. In pretrial proceedings, a U.S. interrogator said he'd told Khadr a tale of an uncooperative Afghan teen who was raped by inmates in an American prison.

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But a top Bush official revealed to journalist Bob Woodward that Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker of Sept.

11, 2001, couldn't be prosecuted in a military commission because of "life-threatening" torture. And the military case against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Mohamedou Ould Slahi -- who recently won his habeas petiti-

on, partly by claiming coercion - ended in 2007 before formal charges were filed, after the lead prosecutor said that key admissions had been extracted by torture.

Even if the administration doesn't prosecute any more of the GuantĂĄnamo prisoners, the legal damage caused by harsh

interrogations is likely to keep emerging as their detention challenges move through court.

At least 50 more prisoners have filed habeas lawsuits before federal judges in Washington.

This article was originally published jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal.

The pogrom of gays in Iraq Gays are reported by people in their neighbourhoods and sometimes by their families. They are stopped and singled out at checkpoints. The state does nothing to protect them. Most killing is by militias such as the Mehdi army. In fact there is a law which forgives so-called 'honour' killings of gays. Forces have specifically sought out members of Iraqi LGBT, for example through the destruction of safe houses and murders of organisers. The group has lost many members who have been targeted for assassination.

Photo by: Jason Pier in DC @ Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

By Paul Canning, Editor of LGBT Asylum News Occasionally the world has heard about the killings of gay people in Iraq. Mostly, though, very few journalists or NGOs have covered the situation, which is by far the worst in the world for gay people.

For a couple of years I have been involved with supporting the Iraqi LGBT group.

The situation there has dropped off the media radar. This is despite it being the worst place in the world to be gay. Iraqi LGBT has documented 738 killings.

This far outstrips anything similar in Iran.

Prior to the invasion Baghdad was part of an officially secular society. Women had rights and were able to have a degree of equality. Baghdad supported a 'gay scene' something like what

exists in Beirut now and was therefore a magnet for Arabs from throughout the region.

Gays were tolerated and there was not the state action against or that coming from religious groups.

Since the invasion religious groups have formed militias which have specifically targeted gays. This is well documented now by major media and groups like Amnesty and Human Rights

recently leaked. Once arrested by police gays are inevitably handed to militias to then be tortured and killed and their bodies left in a public place. Iraqi LGBT know of two young guys which this has happened to in March. Their bodies were grafittied with the word 'homo’ alongside the Iraqi Arab epithet for 'gay'. This is a new development which follows a documentary on gays produced by Iraq's leading secular TV station which

Gays in Iraq have managed to survive enormous, almost unimaginable pressures to continue to help each other.

Friends and supporters throughout the world have provided much welcome help.

Watch. However it was Iraqi LGBT which first drew the world's attention and, for example, told the world about Shia leader Sistani's death fatwa (order to kill) against gays.

Three orders from judges for gays to be arrested have been

used that word. Iraqi LGBT have reports that the word 'homo' is now being used throughout Iraq.

The media report is welcome but increased visibility is bound to mean a murderous backlash unlike that seen anywhere else in the world.

Those responsible for the situation in Iraq for gays are those who invaded the country as well as the Iraqi authorities. Neither have done anything to stop the killings and to offer sanctuary for those fleeing the violence.

There are people trying to get them to take responsibility. For example, in February, 45 members of congress wrote to Hilary Clinton asking for action to rescue Iraqi gays under threat and I understand that a process is underway to provide targeted help to gay Iraqi refugees through UNHCR. The international community must take responsibility for the situation they have caused and support those who desperately need help. Iraqi LGBT receive no support from them for rescue, including the safe houses. Iraqi gays face enormous problems in getting sanctuary from them, although UNHCR has deemed them a group at special risk. Gay organisations internationally must focus more on the country which is by far the worst in the world for gays,

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which they have failed to do.

About Iraqi LGBT

The biggest problem and challenge right now is a complete lack of focus on the pogrom for gays in Iraq. It is striking that media, including gay media, and gay organisations in particular have focused their attention elsewhere. This is noticed by Iraqis and they feel completely abandoned.

Iraqi LGBT was established in 2005 by Ali Hili, who is based in London.

Iraqi LGBT have survived enormous pressures and is still here.

Gays in Iraq have managed to survive enormous, almost unimaginable pressures to continue to help each other. Friends and supporters throughout the world have provided much welcome help.

Ali is the leader and the only one able and willing to be public.

This has led to personal fatwas against him from inside Iraq and he has been threatened in London. As a result he is under the protection of the Metropolitan Police.

Ali Hili came to the UK in 2001, he fled for reasons unrelated to his sexuality due to targeting by the Iraqi state. His first appeal for asylum was turned down in 2005 but in 2007 he was given 'leave to remain', Unfortunately there is a severe backlog in finalising UK asylum claims and his appeals for the claim to be expedited have been turned down by the British authorities.

As a result Ali's status means he

is unable to leave the UK and fulfill speaking engagements in the USA and Spain and to meet with others such as politicians and gay, Christian and human rights groups eager to offer support. Obviously this severely impacts on the whole group's ability to publicise the cause of Iraqi gays and to raise money.

The existence of the Iraqi LGBT group is well-known to forces in Iraq. Those forces have supporters in London and they have attempted to track him down.

Police are aware of this and aware of suspicious attempts to discover his previous location, he has since moved. He has received numerous threats by phone as the number is well known as it is also used by Iraqis seeking help and has to be public. Photographs of Ali do exist but Iraqi LGBT no longer want

his face shown. He receives advice from the London police on methods to protect himself however he cannot become invisible and stop being active, which is their main advice on how to protect himself.

Iraqi LGBT faces two main challenges. Firstly, the need for funds to support the existing safe houses and be able to develop new ones. The group's main funder is the Dutch organisation Hivos and next individual donations but there is no guarantee of continued support by Hivos and donations are small. The second main challenge is the need for Ali to receive UK asylum so he can travel and raise funds for the group and its international profile through, for example, meeting with members of the US Congress and European parliamentarians.

Tens of thousands of detainees at risk of torture in Iraq, following US handover Several detainees are alleged to have died in custody, apparently as a result of torture or other ill-treatment by Iraqi interrogators and prison guards, who regularly refuse to confirm their detention or whereabouts to relatives.

One example given is that of Riyadh Mohammad Saleh al'Uqaibi, 54 and married with children, who died in custody on 12 or 13 February 2010, as a result of internal bleeding having been beaten so hard during interrogation that his ribs were broken and his liver damaged.

Photo by: takomabibelot @ Flickr / CC 2.0

By Amnesty International Tens of thousands of detainees held without trial in Iraq, many of whom were recently transferred from US custody, remain at risk of torture and other forms of ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful detentions and torture in Iraq details thousands of arbitrary detentions, sometimes for several years without charge or trial, severe beatings of detainees, often in secret prisons, to obtain forced confessions, and enforced disappearances.

Amnesty estimates that 30,000 detainees are held without trial in Iraq (it states that the Iraqi authorities have failed to provide precise figures). Ten thousand of those were recently transferred from US custody as their combat troops ended some operations in Iraq.

A former member of the Iraqi Special Forces, he was arrested in late September 2009 and held in a detention facility in the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, before being transferred to a secret prison at the old Muthanna airport.

His body was handed over to his family several weeks later. The death certificate gave his cause of death as "heart failure".

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Photo by: The US Army @ Flickr / CC 2.0

More than 400 detainees were held in the secret prison at the old Muthanna airport, whose existence was revealed publicly in April 2010.

Several of the detainees held there told Amnesty International they were detained on the basis of false information that Iraqi security forces obtained from secret informants.

They had been held without any access to the outside world and some were tortured or otherwise ill-treated during interrogation, apparently to make them confess to involvement in bombings or other crimes that could incur the death penalty.

Torture is widely used in Iraq to obtain "confessions". In many cases these are already prepared by interrogators and detainees are forced to sign while blindfolded and without reading the contents.

Prepared confessions are often used as the only evidence against detainees when they are

brought to trial, including in cases where the charges incur the death penalty.

Hundreds of prisoners are reported to have been sentenced to death, and some have been executed, after being convicted on the basis of "confessions" which they said were false and had been signed under torture or other duress.

Methods of torture include beating with cables and hosepipes, prolonged suspension by the limbs, administration of electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, breaking of limbs, removal of finger and toenails, asphyxiation and piercing of the body with drills, and psychological torture such as threats of rape.

Thousands of people also continue to be detained despite judicial orders issued for their release, and a 2008 Iraqi Amnesty Law, which provides for the release of uncharged detainees after between six and twelve months.

The US forces completed the transfer of all but 200 prisoners to Iraqi custody on 15 July 2010 without any guarantees against torture or ill-treatment.

The report also highlights long term detentions in the northern Kurdistan region by the Asayish – Kurdish security police.

Walid Yunis Ahmad, 52 and a father of three, has been arbitrarily detained without charge or trial for more than 10 years since his arrest on 6 February 2000 in Erbil, capital of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, by members of the Asayish.

He is the longest held, untried detainee in Iraq known to Amnesty International.

Three years after his arrest his family discovered that he was alive but still detained and were able to visit him.

Walid Yunis Ahmad is alleged to have been tortured, and has been held in solitary confinement since going on a 45 day hunger strike in 2008 in protest

at his continuing detention. He is currently still held at the Asayish headquarters in Erbil.

"The Iraqi authorities must take the firm and decisive action now, at the completion of the handover of prisons to Iraqi custody, to show that they have the political will to uphold the human rights of all Iraqis, in accordance with their international obligations, and to stop the torture and other gross abuses of detainees’ rights that are so prevalent today," said Malcolm Smart of Amnesty.

"Detainees who have been held for long periods without recognizable criminal charges against them, and without having been tried, must be released or brought to trial promptly in full compliance with international standards of fair trial and without recourse to the death penalty" added Smart.

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For more information...

The “Preventing Torture within the Fight against Terrorism” newsletter is published bimonthly as part of a joint FIDH-IRCT project aimed at reinstating respect for the prohibition against torture in counterterrorism strategies both globally and in ten target countries: Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Mauritania, Pakistan, the Philippines and Russia.

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To submit content or make enquiries, email Sune Segal, Head of Communications, IRCT, at tortureandterrorNL@irct.org For more information about the “Preventing Torture within the Fight against Terrorism” project, please visit the IRCT web site (www.irct.org) or contact: Sune Segal, Head of Communications, IRCT, +45 20 34 69 14, sse@irct.org or Isabelle Brachet, Director of Operations, FIDH, +33 1 43 55 25 18, ibrachet@fidh.org