This article titled “Chris Tappin denies terror links amid US charge over Iran arms deal” was written by David Batty and Shiv Malik, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 27th April 2012 09.00 UTC

A retired British businessman who was extradited to the US in February on charges of dealing arms to Iran, has denied any connection with terrorism and claimed he was the victim of an FBI sting operation.

Chris Tappin, 65 who was released on bail after his family paid ,000 (£31,026) of a m (£620,527) bond, said: “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never had any connections with terrorism and I’m just appalled that things could come to this stage.”

Speaking to the BBC after a Texas court freed him on condition that he wear an electronic tag and agree to have his emails monitored, Tappin said: “I didn’t know these batteries were for hawk missiles and … I didn’t know they were destined for Iran.”

Tappin, from Orpington, south-east London, lost his two-year battle against extradition to the US, and denies trying to sell batteries for surface-to-air missiles that were to be shipped from the US to Tehran via the Netherlands.

He claims he was the victim of entrapment in a “sting” organised by US government agents.

Tappin could face up to 35 years in prison if convicted.

At his bail hearing, Tappin, who has been retired for four years, was ordered to surrender his passport and is restricted to travel only to El Paso and Houston, where he will stay with one of his lawyers.

The case has fuelled criticism of the UK’s extradition arrangements with both the US and Europe while the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, has said that Tappin’s extradition has highlighted problems with the UK-US treaty that are not “readily curable”.

Other critics of the 2003 treaty, including the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, have described it as “one-sided”, but an independent review last year by retired court of appeal judge Lord Justice Scott Baker found it was both balanced and fair.

Tappin’s extradition follows an investigation that started in 2005 when US agents asked technology providers about buyers who might have prompted alarm.

Those customers were then approached by companies set up by government agencies.

Robert Gibson, an associate of Tappin who agreed to co-operate, was jailed for 24 months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to export defence articles.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

As Gary McKinnon’s local MP, David Burrowes has been leading the campaign in Parliament to stop his extradition to the US.
For that we would like to congratulate him and hope that he can keep up the pressure on the government to bring Garys tortuous 10 years to an end.
Above quotes taken from David Burrowes MP site.

This article titled “The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th April 2012 17.03 UTC

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that major media firms hate technology. They certainly fear it. Since Jack Valenti, the legendary film industry lobbyist, said in 1982 that the VCR was like the Boston Strangler, preparing to murder the innocents of Hollywood, they have viewed such advances as a Godzilla creature rising from the sea to threaten their existence.

In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.

In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.

Around him was chaos. Amid a cacophony of phones, political interns were struggling to keep up with the calls and emails from angry people across the US and the world claiming Hollywood-backed legislation was about to break the internet and end its open culture forever. In an unprecedented day of action, Wikipedia and Reddit, a social news website, had gone offline in a protest organised by their communities of editors, and backed by thousands of other sites, large and small. Google had blacked out its logo in protest. Students around the world were bitching on Twitter that they couldn’t get their homework done without Wikipedia. Even Kim Kardashian came out swinging.

One senator’s office that Masnick visited calculated they had taken 3,000 calls. Within hours of the unprecedented assault, Sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was dead and a sister act, Pipa, a neat acronym for the tortuously titled Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) was sunk too. In Europe, the action buoyed up opponents of Acta, the US-backed international copyright treaty that has sparked protests across the continent. Countries including Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia have all refused to sign, arguing that Acta endangers freedom of speech and privacy, and the bill has stalled. But for how long? “The industry has this down cold,” Masnick says. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Valenti’s old stomping ground and one of the most powerful lobbying bodies in Washington, has emerged bruised from the battle, but few doubt it will rally.

There is widespread anger among leading media companies about the way the Sopa fight played out. The protest had many voices but there was no doubting whom the media executives blamed – Silicon Valley in general and Google in particular. President Barack Obama had “thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters”, according to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire includes the Fox studios. “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them,” Murdoch wrote on Twitter. “No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

But trying to blame Google or even to cast this as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to misrepresent a major shift in the media landscape, say those pushing for a more open internet.

Elizabeth Stark, a free culture advocate who has been campaigning for a relaxation of copyright law for years, says the Sopa battle will be seen as a landmark in a much wider debate about the open nature of the internet compared with the closed, copyright-protected world from before the digital age.

“This wasn’t Google v Hollywood,” says Stark, a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. “This was 15 million internet users v Hollywood. That’s what they don’t get. I think they think we can just get a few executives and put them in a room and call those people ‘the internet’. Well, now they know that’s not going to work.” That said, Stark doubts that this battle is over. The losing side is rallying its troops. The media giant Viacom, owner of Paramount Pictures and Comedy Network, has reanimated a bn (£630m)suit against Google’s YouTube, which it accuses of allowing users to use its copyright material from shows such as South Park and The Colbert Report. No legislation in the US is likely before November’s election. But as Wikileaks showed, the US has already pushed for Sopa-style legislation in Spain and in the tech community, few doubt that Sopa will be revived.

After the act was shelved, Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents music labels, wrote a blistering article in the New York Times attacking Wikipedia and Google for spreading misinformation in order to cause a “digital tsunami” that “raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age”.

Sherman wrote: “The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular websites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.” Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales says the RIAA is missing the point. “They are irrelevant at this point. I don’t care what they have to say. Someone is so far out of touch with what is going on in Washington, with the public and with their own industry.”

For decades, the media industry has tightened its hold on copyright material. There are valid arguments for protecting the rights of content creators, but it is now clear that applying these rules to the digital age isn’t going to work – not least because those now affected by copyright rules are not just other companies but ordinary people. “The public think it’s gone too far,” said Wales. “It’s just possible that we may be at a point where we can stop the march forward of this ridiculousness.”

The internet has changed the world so much that current legislation is not adequate, said Wales. “Go back 50 years and copyright was an industrial regulation that most people had no contact with,” he said. “It was pretty difficult to find yourself in a position where you had committed a felony.” Now the US is trying to extradite Richard O’Dwyer, a 23-year-old UK-based computer science student, on copyright infringement charges. “When, 50 years ago, could a kid sitting in his basement in the UK commit a crime in the US? It’s disturbing.”

What are the legitimate limits to copyright? What’s the ethical norm for copying? “None of that is clear yet. It’s going to take time to work that out,” said Wales. Until 18 January, the debate within legislatures had been about extension and enforcement of the current rules. Now he hopes there may be time for a bigger debate. “We also need to bring back into discussion serious issues about the length of copyright, which has been extended again and again for no good purpose. We need to talk about what constitutes fair use, what kind of copying can the public do without getting into trouble.” If, for example, someone uploads a video of their child’s birthday party and then finds it has been deleted because a copyrighted song is playing in the background, “that’s not piracy. That’s how we use our music these days,” says Wales. “A lot of what people want to do now is not legal but should be legal. We can say that and still be against full-scale piracy.”

Wales said he had never heard of Megaupload, the online file sharing site at the centre of an international criminal investigation, before it was shut down, but had friends who used it. “It was people who lived outside the US who said they would have bought such and such but they don’t sell it here,” he says. “If there’s some great show that they are not showing over here, they are very tempted. We can morally disapprove, but that’s the way people are.” Megaupload was charging a subscription to people who wanted a lot of content. “Why should you pay these assholes money when you could pay the people who actually made it some money?” said Wales. If the media industry addressed the needs of its audience, there would be less piracy, he believes.

Stark points to a study by Musiksverige (Music Sweden), an industry association, that found music piracy in Sweden fell significantly after the introduction of Spotify, a streaming music service. “It shows what we have said all along: people want to reward artists for their work.”

Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder, agrees. “I’m hopeful right now. These are not soundbite issues, they are complicated. If you look at the work that Reddit’s community did investigating Sopa, you can see that there is a lot of thought going into these issues in the community. Like a lot of rights, I think we took our right to a life online for granted until it was challenged. I think we are on guard now.”

Media execs are on guard too. Many look to the music industry and fear they may be next. Since the peer-to-peer filesharing site Napster emerged in 1999, music sales in the US have dropped 53%, from .6bn to .9bn in 2010. The digital world is a lot less lucrative than selling DVDs.

Last year the movie industry made bn at the box office worldwide. Ed Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist, calculates box office revenue accounts for just 10% of a hit movie’s money. The rest comes from cable and satellite channels, pay-per-view TV, video rentals, DVD sales and digital downloads. All that extra cash comes from sources that Hollywood once railed against, and pressed Washington to crack down on.

But this time Epstein believes the industry may be right to be worried.

As the music industry has shown, digital sales are worth a fraction of physical sales. There are already signs that the movie industry is changing.

There was a new player in town at the Sundance film festival this year, one who had financed 17 of the movies on show. That player was you. Kickstarter, a three-year-old website that hosts crowdsourced fundraising for creative projects, had funded 17 films at Sundance, about 10% of the total, and had another 33 films at the South by Southwest festival in March. The company is now a significant player in independent film, allowing cinematic hopefuls to take their case right to the people. It’s just the beginning of a major change in the industry, says Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler.

“I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music. People can now speak directly to their audiences,” he said. “And the demands of an audience are very different to the demands of an industry. An industry wants to know about merchandising tie-ins with McDonalds – that’s not necessarily what the audience is looking for, or what the artist is concerned with.”

Strickler was at Sundance this year, where a number of Kickstarter-financed films were offered distribution deals. But many people were also rejecting deals they saw as disadvantageous.

“Going straight to the web, or video on demand, or doing a deal with independent cinemas – these are all viable options now,” said Strickler. “Look at the success of that Joseph Kony video. This is just the beginning.”

• Explore the seven-day special series on the Battle for the internet

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This article titled “US/UK extradition agreement too one-sided, says Keith Vaz” was written by James Ball and Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Thursday 19th April 2012 18.44 UTC

The chair of the influential House of Commons home affairs committee, Keith Vaz, has said the extradition of Sheffield student Richard O’Dwyer is the most apparent example of the “one-sided” UK/US extradition agreement which “did not protect the rights of British citizens”.

O’Dwyer faces up to 10 years in a high-security US prison for alleged copyright violations after setting up tvshack.net in 2007, a search engine linking to sites where users could watch and occasionally download TV shows online.

The Liberal Democrat president, Tim Farron, has called on the home secretary to revoke her permission for his extradition, as the Guardian reported yesterday, calling the bid ludicrous.

Vaz, whose committee recently reviewed the US/UK extradition arrangements, plans to meet with O’Dwyer and his mother Julia next week.

“The home affairs committee’s report into extradition arrangements with the US concluded that they were one-sided and that they did not protect the rights of British citizens in the same way as American citizens,” he said.

“This is most apparent in the case of Richard O’Dwyer, who allegedly committed crimes while living in the UK.

“British citizens must be given the opportunity to face trial in the United Kingdom. I have today asked him and his mother to discuss this report with me next week.”

The home affairs committee report, which was published on 27 March, recommended re-negotiation of the US/UK extradition treaty to increase the evidence requirement on US authorities, require more information from prosecutors, and introduce a hearing to discuss which jurisdiction should hear cases.

The O’Dwyer case comes as UK authorities continue to work out how to tackle the thorny issue of regulating the internet. The attorney general, Dominic Grieve, cautioned that internet businesses such as Google and Facebook could not be expected to “act like a policeman” monitoring the contents of their sites.

“If a breach [of a court order] is brought to their attention then they will take action. But they can’t act as a policeman on their network; I don’t think that’s necessarily helpful. They do need to act responsibly and clearly need to abide by the laws of the land,” he said.

However, Grieve also cautioned users of social networks that they should not expect to be able to break court orders with impunity for an indefinite period, as happened en masse in the cases of previous injunctions – most famously in the case of mass-tweeting about a ‘superinjunction’ obtained by Ryan Giggs.

Grieve said he did not believe that the Giggs injunction was an example of a conspiracy to undermine the courts, but added that he would intervene in civil cases if his action served a wider public interest.

“The blunt reality is that somebody who tweets is likely to find themselves in contempt by the party who obtained the order … It is only a matter of time before that happens if people continue behaving this way.”

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This article titled “Richard O’Dwyer: Lib Dems fight to halt extradition to US on piracy charges” was written by James Ball, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th April 2012 20.30 UTC

The government is coming under cross-party pressure from within the coalition to stay the extradition of a Sheffield student who founded a website sharing links to TV shows, and to review the US extradition treaty in the wake of the case.

The home secretary Theresa May signed an extradition order last month for Richard O’Dwyer, 23, to be sent to the US, where he faces 10 years in high-security prison.

O’Dwyer founded a website, tvshack.net, in 2007, which acted as a search engine for people to find out where they could watch and in some cases download popular TV shows, typically programmes not yet available outside America. Some of the links led to legal sources, others to unauthorised sites.

The president of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, called on Theresa May to review her decision to approve the “ludicrous” extradition, while Conservative backbenchers said extraditions such as O’Dwyer’s serve as “a thorn in the side of the special relationship”.

O’Dwyer’s site did not directly store, offer, or copy any of the programmes it listed, but rather linked to other sites which had done so, in a similar manner to how Google and other search engines display results.

US authorities allege that O’Dwyer made around £147,000 from advertising displayed on the site during its three-year life. His defence lawyers contend that linking to other content is not illegal under UK law, and point out that the CPS did not pursue charges against O’Dwyer.

Farron said: “While it’s important to protect artists and copyright there is a question about just who is responsible for any breach [in this case] anyway.

“It is ludicrous and the government needs to take a very strong stand on protecting civil liberties.”

He said he hoped his Lib Dem colleagues would bring pressure to bear on Theresa May. “One assumes that until he’s on a plane she has the power to rescind it.”

Farron pointed to the contrast between the Abu Qatada case, where someone with a clear case to answer could not be extradited for years: “Whereas here somebody who doesn’t have a case to answer is whisked through quickly.”

Richard’s mother, Julia O’Dwyer, is a nurse for the terminally ill who is campaigning for her son and others in a similar position.

She said: “You’re punished before you even go to trial. You’re put through the nightmare of extradition, and if you are sent to the US, you’re immediately thrown in jail, where they wear you down pre-trial until you take a plea bargain, whether you’re guilty or not – 98% of people don’t get to trial in America. You can only get a fair trial if you can pay for it, and that’s millions of pounds.”

Since then, Julia says she spends “all day, every day” working on the case, except when she needs to go into work.

“As soon as I get up in the morning, I’m on the computer, and I stay there until nine or ten’o'clock at night. I have to force myself to do anything else,” she says. “Our lawyers have got a lot of cases, I’ve only got one. Anything might help.”The US justice department claims jurisdiction over all .com and .net webpages, whether or not they are created by US nationals or hosted in America, giving it domain over millions of overseas sites.

Conservative backbencher Dominic Raab, a prominent civil liberties campaigner said he struggled to see the difference between O’Dwyer’s actions and those of major search engines.

“If what Richard O’Dwyer has done is illegal under UK law, surely many of the other search engines would be guilty too,” he said. “Each new case like this creates a thorn in the side of the special relationship. We want strong extradition rules for terrorists and others, but when people see laws used against an enterprising 23-year-old, they lose faith.”

Former shadow home secretary David Davis has also spoken out in favour of O’Dwyer, and attended a campaigning event at Sheffield Hallam University for the student.

Julia says there is a network of relatives who support each other in their extradition battles. Janis Sharp, the mother of Gary McKinnon, who faces extradition for alleged hacking attacks on the Pentagon, often sends over links and useful information.

“We didn’t know anything about extradition. That’s something for terrorists and murderers, fugitives who’ve fled their country after a crime,” Julia explains. “There’s not a single hint of support from the home office or US embassy, so we help each other.”

Julia says she devotes her time to fighting the extradition – she campaigns on Twitter, her blog, and on a petition which has garnered more than 21,000 signatures – in a bid to keep a normal life for her son, who is still studying at Sheffield Hallam University.

“It’s a really destructive process to be involved in,” she says. “Richard’s trying to carry on as normal, and I’m trying to make sure he can do. I wouldn’t say it’s a normal life. It takes over.”

Sir Menzies Campell, who is carrying out a review of extradition policy for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, refused to comment on current cases but said the UK extradition treaty needed more stringent controls.

“One of the ways to test the legitimacy of applications for extradition like this one would be for guidelines to be laid down, probably by the Lord Chief Justice himself, about the degree of connection between a person in the UK and the impact on the US,” he said. “In many states in Americas, the doctrine on extrajudicial jurisdiction is very well developed and should always be a factor to be taken into account in any decision to extradite.”

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This article titled “Labour calls for Babar Ahmad to be charged and tried in UK” was written by Vikram Dodd, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th April 2012 10.05 UTC

Labour’s justice spokesman is pressing the home secretary for Babar Ahmad to be charged in Britain instead of being extradited to the US to face terrorism charges, the Guardian has learned.

The intervention by Sadiq Khan comes as the Crown Prosecution Service admits deciding not to put Ahmad on trial here after examining only some of the evidence against him, though much of the material was collected by British police.

Ahmad and his family believe he should be tried in the UK if he has a case to answer, not “subcontracted” to the US.

Last week the European court of human rights ruled that Ahmad and four other men held in Britain can be extradited to the US where they are wanted on terrorism charges.

The US claims Ahmad ran a website, Azzam publications, which provided support to terrorists and was involved in a conspiracy to kill.

Khan, who represents Tooting in south London, is the constituency MP for Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan, who is also facing extradition.

In a letter to the home secretary, Theresa May, Khan last week wrote:: “You may be aware that the Metropolitan police and CPS only viewed a small portion of the evidence against my constituents – and sent the vast majority to the United States authorities without first reviewing it to see if British authorities could bring charges against Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan. I would ask that you satisfy yourself that proper procedures were followed at all times in these two cases.”

Khan’s letter continues: “I would specifically ask that you personally review the case against my constituents to see if charges can be brought against Babar Ahmad and Syed Taiha Ahsan here in the UK. They have always been willing to stand trial in a British court, and in front of a jury of their peers.”

In a separate letter to the attorney general, Khan said: “It is clear that the bulk of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan police was provided directly to the US authorities without the CPS reviewing it.”

Ahmad’s family and lawyers had believed the CPS viewed all the evidence before deciding not to bring charges in the UK, which left the way open for the US extradition prcoeedings. Last November the CPS admitted only “a small number of documents seized by the Metropolitan police were submitted for advice”. A letter from Sue Hemming, head of the CPS’s counter-terrorism division also said the CPS had not considered any evidence in charging Ahsan.

In a statement, the CPS said: “We made clear to Mr Ahmad’s solicitors in a letter last November that the CPS as domestic prosecutors saw a small number of documents gathered as evidence by the police in this country, which was insufficient for a prosecution here.

“At the time this decision was made, domestic prosecutors were aware of the nature of the evidence in the possession of the US, but the entirety of the evidence was never subject to review in this country as it formed part of the case built by the US and was held there.”

“The evidence found in the UK and submitted to the CPS by the Metropolitan police service, even if it had potentially amounted to an offence of collecting information likely to be useful for a terrorist purpose, amounted to only a small fraction of the criminality alleged against Babar Ahmad by the US.”

Ahmad has spent the last eight years in prison in the UK. The key evidence against him came from searches of his south London home and lockers and computer equipment he used at Imperial College London.

Furthermore, bank accounts and postal orders to fund the Azzam website, which the US says shows Ahmad was instrumental in running it, were all based or originated in Britain.

The US says a server used to host the Azzam website for a period of time was based in Conneticut.

Lawyers for the men facing extradition to the US are considering an appeal to the grand chamber of the European court. Judges last week decided that the length of sentences the men faced, and conditions of detention in a Supermax prison in Colorado with extensive periods of solitary confinement, did not amount to inhumane treatment or torture as defined by article three of the European convention on human rights.

But the UN’s leading expert on torture has said he fears conditions the men would face in the US would amount to torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment.

In an intervention in the case, which the European court essentially rejected, Professor Juan Méndez, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on torture, wrote to the court saying: “I am concerned that extradition of a detainee to a state that practices solitary confinement with limited recourse would violate article 3.”

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This article titled “Abu Hamza extradition ruling should be a wake-up call to the legal system” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for The Guardian on Tuesday 10th April 2012 14.52 UTC

The government has made clear it was hugely relieved when it heard that the European court of human rights backed the extradition to the US of Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad and three other men accused of terrorism-related offences.

This is hardly surprising. It should now be easier in future for the UK to send suspects to the US without British or European judges getting in the way. It might also relieve the pressure on the government from MPs to reopen the controversial 2003 extradition treaty with the US. Under the terms of the treaty, negotiated by the Blair government, it is easier to extradite a British citizen to the US than vice versa.

The coalition has shown that it is as craven as its predecessor on matters concerning Britain’s closest ally. How would Washington have responded had Strasbourg blocked the extradition of the five men on the grounds their human rights would be violated? The British government could not bear to think, judging by its willingness to appease the US on matters relating to security and intelligence. Nowhere has this been made so clearly than in its plan to prevent information held by MI5, MI6, and GCHQ from ever being disclosed in court.

Ministers say their plan for secret courts is designed to protect Britain’s national security, by ensuring that the US will continue its special intelligence-sharing relationship with Britain. Yet if the government gets its way, evidence of wrongdoing, even connivance in torture, by Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, and what ministers knew about it, would in future never see the light of day.

Evidence relating to the brutal treatment by the CIA of British citizens and residents rendered to Guantánamo Bay, emerged in court thanks to some conscientious British judges. Ministers, MI5, and MI6 protest that torture is abhorrent and they would have nothing to do with it. Yet when evidence threatened to be disclosed in court revealing that the US told MI5 and MI6 that Binyam Mohamed and other British citizens and residents secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay had been brutally treated, ministers were the first to insist the evidence must be withheld.

If the evidence was disclosed, they warned, the US, and the CIA in particular, would stop sharing intelligence with Britain.

The British judges were not impressed. “The treatment to which Mr Mohamed was subjected could never properly be described in a democracy as ‘a secret’ or an ‘intelligence secret’ or ‘a summary of classified intelligence’,” they said. They added: “It was impossible to believe that President Obama would take action against the United Kingdom,” if the summary of CIA material was disclosed. Publication was “necessary to uphold the rule of law and democratic accountability”, the judges continued.

Would Obama really “curtail the supply of information to the United States’ oldest ally when what was put into the public domain was not intelligence?” they asked rhetorically. There was no rational basis, they said, for claims made by the then foreign secretary David Miliband and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton that disclosure would affect the supply of US intelligence to the UK and put British lives at risk.

Parliament’s human rights committee observed last week that the US was suffering from a “misperception” that British courts could not stop the disclosure of information on genuine national security grounds.

In its ruling, the European court of human rights suggests the problems are mutual, that the US is not the only villain. The Strasbourg judges made the point that conditions in some European jails are worse than the “Supermax” jail in Colorado where the five men are expected to be incarcerated in solitary confinement. In the US they will at least face trial. In Britain, Babar Ahmad has been held for nearly eight years without one.

The Strasbourg ruling brings to mind documents disclosed in British courts which revealed how Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, advised his officials in 2002 that sending British nationals seized by US forces to Guantanamo Bay was the “best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective”. He rejected the alternative of repatriation to the UK. He added: “It is for the US authorities to determine the details of how these prisoners should be handled. They have told us they would be treated humanely.”

The Strasbourg ruling should be a wake-up call, to put in place as a matter of urgency an open, fair, and speedy, system of justice in the UK, the rest of Europe, and the US. And stop treating such claims relating to “security” or “terror” as so dangerous they need to be wrapped up and protected by special courts, and, as far as both the UK and US governments are concerned, treated with such deference.

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This article titled “Strasbourg: the reckoning” was written by Ros Taylor, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 12th April 2012 12.45 UTC

“The European court of human rights (ECtHR) is one of the most political bodies on the planet. The judges also have an addiction to power,” claimed the Daily Mail yesterday, in the face of yesterday’s ruling that Abu Hamza could be extradited to the US. “Their days of inflicting harmful verdicts on the people of Britain are far from over.”

The paper makes no mention of next week’s Council of Europe conference in Brighton, when Britain will attempt to increase the margin of appreciation we enjoy in interpreting ECtHR decisions. But while the event is a chance to tackle the court’s failings head-on, not least its large (though slowly diminishing) caseload, it is also a fine opportunity to look at some of the rulings it has handed down over the past year – whether they directly concerned the UK or not.

The court has already handed down 325 judgments this year and 1,157 during 2011. Few of them have received any coverage in the mainstream British press, though blogs in the Guardian Legal Network have reported some. Ahead of next week’s conference, and as the Council of Europe publishes its 2011 report into whether countries are executing decisions (80% more of them than in 2010, it says), Guardian Law would like to paint a broader picture of what goes on in Strasbourg. Some of the court’s decisions will always be controversial. How could they be otherwise, given the ECtHR is the final court of appeal for citizens of member states? But they raise fascinating points that resonate with anyone with an interest in the law. Can someone be exempted from testifying against their long-term partner when he is suspected of murder? (We shall have to wait until the judgment in Van der Heijden v the Netherlands is handed down to find out.) Did the Russian authorities adequately investigate the Katyn massacre? (Janowiec and others v Russia, judgment due on Monday.) Does a woman have the right to adopt her civil partner’s child? (Not in France: Gas and Dubois v France.)

Where do you come in? We’d like Guardian Law readers, many of whom follow developments in Strasbourg closely, to highlight rulings – whether you agreed with them or not – that have set a precedent and changed the way citizens are treated. Comments will be open for a week. We’d be grateful if you could link to the judgment (which should, if possible, be in English) and give a brief explanation of how it affects both the applicant and the legal landscape. All the court’s 2011 judgments can be found here and the 2012 judgments here

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This article titled “Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials” was written by Ian Cobain, for The Guardian on Sunday 8th April 2012 15.26 UTC

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the “alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment” of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

It appears inevitable that Scotland Yard’s detectives will want to question the man who was foreign secretary at the time – Jack Straw.

Ten years before Bouchar’s abduction and rendition, many of her husband’s associates had been permitted to settle in Britain. These men were members of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organisation formed in the early 1990s and dedicated to Gaddafi’s removal. The LIFG was not banned in the UK, and its members appear to have found the country a convenient place to gather and raise funds. There were even reports – officially denied – that MI6 encouraged the LIFG in an unsuccessful attempt on the dictator’s life.

But from 2002 the UK ceased to be such a safe haven for the LIFG. The US and UK governments were beginning to repair their relations with Gaddafi, a rapprochement that would soon see him abandon his WMD programme and open his country’s oil and gas reserves to western corporations.

Held by armed police

One Thursday evening in November that year, a 36-year-old LIFG member who was living in London was arrested by armed police as he attempted to board a flight at Heathrow. He was told he was being detained under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, a piece of legislation that had been rushed on to the statute books within weeks of 9/11, and which allowed the British government to detain international terrorism suspects without trial. From that moment the man was anonymised, by court order – in part to protect his relatives in Libya – and could be referred to only as “M”.

When M had arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker eight years earlier, he had readily told Special Branch detectives that he was a member of the LIFG. On his arrest at Heathrow he insisted that the organisation had no connection with international terrorism and was concerned only with the removal of Gaddafi. After being detained at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London, M appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC), a tribunal that allows the government to give evidence in secret, unseen by the appellant or the appellant’s lawyers.

In March 2004, M became the first and only person detained under the act to win an appeal at SIAC. The tribunal accepted that there were no links between LIFG and al-Qaida, and criticised the Home Office for its “consistent exaggeration” of M’s alleged links with members of al-Qaida. As the law permitted only “international terrorists” to be detained without trial, and not domestic insurgents, M was set free. A few days after SIAC’s decision, notice was passed to the Home Office and MI5, and Fatima Bouchar and her husband were detained in Bangkok.

Bouchar’s husband made no secret of being a leading member of the LIFG. That year, the couple had left China, where they had been living in exile, and attempted to travel to the UK via Malaysia. When they were detained in Kuala Lumpur and questioned about Belhaj’s false Iraqi passport, an acquaintance went to the British high commission to explain that the couple were attempting to reach London. Shortly after this, they were told that they would be permitted to travel to the UK on a BA flight, despite not having EU passports or UK visas. But when the aircraft stopped off at Bangkok, the pair were detained and taken to a US-run detention facility.

It was known that the CIA had been operating a secret prison in Thailand since 9/11, but its precise location was unknown. Bouchar and Belhaj arrived there within minutes of being detained, suggesting that it was located within the perimeter of Don Muang international airport. They were immediately separated.

Belhaj says he was blindfolded, hooded, forced to wear ear defenders, and hung from hooks in his cell wall for what seemed to be hours. He says he was severely beaten. The ear defenders were removed only for him to be blasted with loud music, he says, or when he was interrogated by his US captors.

Bouchar says that when she was dragged away from her husband she feared he was going to be killed. “I thought: ‘This is it.’ I thought I would never see my husband again … They took me into a cell, and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor. I could sit down but I couldn’t move. There was a camera in the room, and every time I tried to move they rushed in. But there was no real communication. I wasn’t questioned.” Bouchar found it difficult to comprehend how she could be treated in this way: she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. “They knew I was pregnant,” she says. “It was obvious.” She says she was given water while chained up, but no food whatsoever. She was chained to the wall for five days. At the end of this period she was taped to the stretcher and put aboard the aircraft, unaware of where she was going or whether her husband was on board. At one point the aircraft landed, remained on the ground for a short period and then took off again. Only when it landed a second time did she hear a man grunting with pain, and realise her husband was nearby.

Belhaj says he had been shackled to the floor of the plane, with his hands chained to his feet in a manner that made it impossible either to sit or lie down. Sometimes his grunts would be met with a kick; on other occasions, he says, a cushion would be placed under his elbows, giving him temporary respite before it was taken away again.

The plane touched down at Tripoli with its cargo still trussed up; a gift, apparently, to the regime they had hoped to overthrow. The pair were driven separately to Tajoura prison, east of the city, and Bouchar was led to a cell where she would spend the next four months. Initially, she was interrogated for around five hours a day. “At one point a cot was brought in the cell along with some baby clothes, nappies, a bed cover and a baby bath,” she says. “I really thought I was going to have to have my baby there, and that we would both be held there.

Bouchar was released shortly before giving birth to a son, apparently because word of her husband’s capture had reached the outside world. Belhaj was brought to her cell for a few moments, and then she was set free, though not permitted to leave the country.

Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised “a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism”. At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

Three days after that, a second leading LIFG member, Abu Munthir al-Saadi, was bundled aboard a plane in Hong Kong and taken to Tripoli in a joint British-Libyan rendition operation. Saadi’s wife and four children were also kidnapped and taken to Libya. The youngest was a girl aged six. The family was incarcerated at Tajoura for more than two months before being released. Saadi and Belhaj were held for more than six years, however, and say they were subjected to torture throughout this time.

At one point, they say, early in their incarceration, they were interrogated by British intelligence officers after being tortured by the Libyan captors. These visitors wanted to learn more about LIFG members living in the UK. The two men say their torturers had made clear that their treatment would improve if they told the British that these LIFG activists were linked with al-Qaida: something that SIAC had ruled, just weeks earlier, was not the case.

The role that MI6 played in arranging the rendition of these two Libyan dissidents and their families is now well known, thanks to a discovery made last September by Peter Bouckaert, a director with Human Rights Watch, inside the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s foreign minister and former intelligence chief. Bouckaert found a file containing hundreds of secret letters and faxes that MI6 and the CIA had sent to Koussa during the early days of the rapprochement between Libya and the west. Among them were a series of documents detailing the 2004 rendition operations.

A close examination of those papers show that a great deal of planning went into the operations, withMI6 informing Koussa’s office as early as November 2003 that they were seeking the assistance of Chinese intelligence officers in their attempt to deal with “the Islamic extremist target in China”. When MI6 learned that Belhaj was being held in Malaysia under his nom de guerre, Abdullah al-Sadiq, along with his pregnant wife, they were quick to tip off Tripoli.

Notoriously, perhaps, one fax from Mark Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6, congratulated Koussa on the “safe arrival” of Belhaj – “the least we could do for you and for Libya” – and referred to an “amusing” request by the CIA that anything the dissident said under interrogation should be passed first to them.

“I know I did not pay for the air cargo,” Allen says: but after all, the intelligence that led to the couple’s rendition was British.

Another fax, sent by the CIA two days before Blair’s visit, with a cover sheet marked “rendition of Abu Munthir”, shows the US to be eager to join and finance that operation after learning that MI6 and Gaddafi’s government were about to embark upon it. Also buried away inside the secret document cache is a fax that shows MI6 felt itself not to be bound by the anonymity order imposed after M had been detained under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act in November 2002. The following January, the intelligence service sent Koussa what it described as an MI5 “intelligence resumé”, detailing M’s full name and date of birth and disclosing that he was an active member of the LIFG. The fax also listed the Libyan telephone numbers called by M. It was being sent, MI6 explained, “for research purposes and analysis purposes”.

By piecing together records of air traffic control logs and matching them with a document found in the Tripoli cache, it is possible to trace the route taken by the aircraft that rendered Bouchar and Belhaj from Bangkok to Tripoli in March 2004. There are a couple of surprises along the way. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 with the tail number N313P, operated by a North Carolina company called Aero Contractors, which has been widely reported to be a CIA front.

N313P is now known to have been used in a great many rendition operations: it was one of the aircraft that carried a shackled and hooded Binyam Mohamed, for example.

According to the records of the European air traffic management agency, Eurocontrol, and the Federal Aviation Administration in the US, N313P took off from Dulles airport in Washington DC at 2.51am on 7 March 2004, landing at Misrata in Libya shortly after noon local time. When N313P departed from Misrata, it flew beyond Eurocontrol’s area of responsibility, and disappears, temporarily, from its records.

But a flight plan had been prepared by the CIA the previous day, and faxed to Libya, where it was found among the secret cache of letters and faxes recovered from Koussa’s office. This document shows that after leaving Libya, the rendition aircraft planned to stay overnight on the Seychelles before continuing to Bangkok. It was then due to leave Bangkok on the evening of 8 March, the date that Bouchar and Belhaj were forced on board an aircraft.The CIA flight plan shows that the aircraft was then due to fly to Tripoli via Diego Garcia, where it would refuel during the early hours of 9 March.

Any evidence that the rendition plane landed on Diego Garcia would be enormously damaging for the British government. Although the remote coral atoll in the Indian Ocean is operated as a US military outpost, it is a British Overseas Territory, and the UK is legally responsible for events there.

The last Labour government was highly sensitive to reports that Diego Garcia played a part in the global rendition programme. Both Blair and Straw insisted on a number of occasions that there was “no evidence” for this. Those assurances proved to be wrong: in February 2008, amid mounting evidence that rendition aircraft had landed on the atoll, David Miliband, one of Straw’s successors at the Foreign Office, told the Commons that he was “very sorry indeed” to report that two rendition flights had refuelled there in 2002.

By way of reassurance, Miliband told MPs that no prisoners had been allowed to disembark while the aircraft were refuelled, and that “US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other overseas territory, or through the UK itself, since then”.

Diego Garcia question

When the CIA flight plan was recovered from Koussa’s office, the Guardian asked the Foreign Office whether the plane carrying Bouchar and Belhaj had indeed stopped off on Diego Garcia, despite Miliband’s assurances. The department sought initially to imply that the aircraft had been refused permission to land, but would not answer the question directly. Asked for a yes-or-no answer, a spokeswoman declined.

In any case, by the evening of 9 March, N313P had reappeared on the radar of Eurocontrol. The agency’s records show the aircraft landed once more at Misrata airport: the exact place that the CIA flight plan said it would be.

On board were Bouchar, taped to her stretcher, and Belhaj, still shackled in an excruciating stress position at the end of their 17 hour flight.

With its prisoners rendered and the Libyan mission accomplished, N313P left for Palma de Mallorca. Hotel records from the five-star Gran Melia Victoria, a favoured destination for rendition teams, show that the crew of 10 men and three women booked in for two nights of rest and recreation.

Curiously, however, when the aircraft left Palma on the evening of 11 March, it did not return to the US. Instead, it flew east to Baghdad. After less than two hours on the ground in Baghdad, it departed for Kabul. N313P remained in Kabul for 24 hours, then flew back to Washington via Larnaca on Cyprus and Shannon on the west coast of Ireland.

The flight to Kabul appears to coincide with another British-initiated operation, one that saw two more people being subjected to extraordinary rendition, this time from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali were two Pakistani men suspected of having travelled to Iraq to fight for al-Qaida. MI6 is understood to have tracked them as they travelled across Iran and into Iraq, and when they arrived at a house in southern Baghdad, a decision was taken to raid the building, a mission codenamed Operation Aston.

SAS troopers attacked the house in late February, shooting dead two men and capturing several others. After the detainees were handed over to the US military, Rahmatullah and Ali were held at a prison at Baghdad international airport, according to a British military source. Then they were flown to Afghanistan and taken to the US-run prison at Bagram, north of Kabul, a transfer that was in breach of the Geneva conventions. They remain at Bagram today, despite an attempt to secure the release of Rahmatullah by persuading the appeal court in London to grant a habeas corpus writ.

The SAS troops who took part in Operation Aston were members of a joint US-UK special forces task force that rounded up large numbers of people in Iraq, missions in which the US was, on every other occasion, deemed legally to be detaining authority. But former members of the taskforce say Operation Aston was an all-British affair, and they were never sure why.

The Guardian has asked the Foreign Office on several occasions whether N313P flew Rahmatullah and Ali to Afghanistan, but the department has always failed to answer.

The following year, 2005, the LIFG was banned in the UK, and a number of its members, including M, were arrested. The Home Office said it had taken this step because it had come to the conclusion that the group was “part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”. To what extent this assessment drew upon intelligence provided by Gaddafi’s government – including statements made by LIFG prisoners under interrogation – remains unclear.

What is becoming clear, however, is that the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Abu Munthir al-Saadi had a number of unintended consequences.

By early 2005, the British government had been forced to conclude that the capture of the more moderate elements among the LIFG leadership, such as Belhaj and al-Saadi, had resulted in a power vacuum that was being filled by men with pan-Islamist ambitions. Among a number of documents found in a second Tripoli cache, at the British ambassador’s abandoned residence, was a secret 58-page MI5 briefing paper that said “the extremists are now in the ascendancy,” and that they were “pushing the group towards a more pan-Islamic agenda inspired by AQ [al-Qaida]“.

The realisation that MI6 had passed M’s name and information about his contacts to Gaddafi’s notorious intelligence agencies, despite the existence of an order seeking to preserve his anonymity, provoked outrage among lawyers who work within the SIAC system.

There was also dismay at the manner in which the rendition operations were mounted shortly after SIAC had ruled that there were no links between the LIFG and al-Qaida. M’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, believes that to be one of the reasons the two men were taken to Libya. “The UK’s complicity in the renditions of Belhaj and Abu Munthir is sickening,” Peirce says. “Their synchronisation with the obtaining of perceived missing ‘intelligence’ for domestic proceedings damns both enterprises equally.”

Last December, the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, wrote to the head of Scotland Yard, Bernard Hogan-Howe, drawing his attention to the two rendition operations. A few weeks later the Yard announced it was mounting a criminal investigation, which is continuing.

Meanwhile, no attempt is being made to deny MI6 involvement in the renditions: instead, well-placed sources say the operations were “ministerially authorised government policy”. This has led to reports that police will need to interview Jack Straw.

The Guardian has repeatedly put a number of questions about the renditions to Straw, asking whether he authorised the operations and, if not, which minister was responsible; the former foreign secretary has repeatedly declined to answer.

A further consequence is that lawyers representing the rendition victims are suing MI6, MI5, the foreign office, and Mark (now Sir Mark) Allen. Belhaj – who was released from prison along with Saadi in 2010 – led the militia that drove Gaddafi’s forces out of Tripoli last year, and is now settled in the city with Bouchar. They embarked on legal proceedings only after the UK government declined to offer them an apology.

Bouchar appears to remain deeply traumatised by her abduction and imprisonment, and that of her husband. “The time around the birth of a first child should be among the happiest in a couple’s lives,” she says, “but it is very difficult for me to look back at that time because I wanted to die rather than be going through what I did.”

Happily, she is now pregnant with the couple’s second child.

Asked whether it wished to say anything that would help explain the UK government’s role in the rendition operations, the Foreign Office declined to comment.

The justice ministry, meanwhile, is pressing ahead with proposed legislation that would introduce SIAC-style secrecy to any civil trial or inquest in which a minister has decided that some evidence is too sensitive to be aired in public.

Bouchar’s lawyers condemn not only her mistreatment, but the plans to force litigation on her behalf into secret court hearing.

Sapna Malik, of the law firm Leigh Day, says: “Fatima’s utterly barbaric treatment, and Britain’s role in it, must come under the full scrutiny of an open court and not be condemned to a secret chamber.”

Cori Crider of the legal charity Reprieve, which is also representing her, added: “It is bad enough that MI6 and the CIA had Abdel Hakim Belhaj tortured, when his only opponent was Colonel Gaddafi, but it is impossible to see what they hoped to achieve by kidnapping his pregnant wife, taping her up and forcing her on a plane back to Libya.

“Instead of saying sorry, the security services are busily trying to shunt Fatima’s case and those like it into secret. Make no mistake: when Ken Clarke says a ‘tiny’ category of national security cases will be heard in closed court, it is Fatima, taped to the stretcher, he and those behind him have in mind.”

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This article titled “Babar Ahmad and the injustice of the US/UK extradition laws” was written by Victoria Brittain, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 6th April 2012 12.07 UTC

Last night’s BBC interview from a high-security prison with Babar Ahmad, who is wanted for extradition to the US on terror charges, confronts the government, yet again, with a case full of embarrassing questions for the Metropolitan police. And for the justice minister, Ken Clarke, it highlights the challenge of how to justify holding a man in a maximum security prison for eight years when he faces no charges in the UK. Clarke may be quietly praying that next Tuesday the European court of human rights will rule that Ahmad cannot be extradited to the US, and British courts therefore can after all hear the case.

Ahmad had no illusions that the interview was his “last chance to convince the authorities,” and he directly asked the director of public prosecutions to put him on trial in the UK here and now, as his family have requested on countless occasions.

At the centre of the US case against Ahmad is evidence that was not seen by the British legal authorities before it was sent to the US – a situation described in parliament last week by both the Conservative MP Dominic Raab and the Labour MP Andy Slaughter as Kafkaesque (and reiterated by Green MP Caroline Lucas in last night’s BBC programme). They are certainly not the only ones wanting to know why that happened.

The Metropolitan police – the very body that took the evidence and sent it straight to the US without showing it to the Crown Prosecution Service – had inflicted more than 70 separate injuries on Ahmad during his earlier arrest in late 2003, when he was released without charge. Did anyone think at the time that to extradite him to the US under the new fast-track procedures would conveniently get the problem of his attempts at redress from the police safely out of the way? 

In fact, at the same time in 2004 that the CPS concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge him here (having, we now know, seen only a small percentage of it) they were also concluding that there was insufficient evidence to charge any police officer for assaulting him. That decision was reversed some years later. In March 2009, in a civil case, the Met admitted liability and paid Ahmad substantial damages of £60,000 for his injuries.

Did the police or the CPS never imagine the future trouble they were piling up in every direction? The assaults on him, the failure to prosecute the police and the failure by the police to give the CPS the material on which to prosecute Ahmed. The CPS then changed its mind when pressed on the police assaults and prosecuted them. Meanwhile the UK government resisted flat out in the European court of human rights for four years any suggestion that the US might not be the right place to deal with this very domestic affair. In the Muslim community in Britain every aspect of this case is followed in detail and has an impact, which will not just fade away. Parallels with the Stephen Lawrence case are hard to ignore.

In the years Ahmad has been locked up, he has lost his marriage and his job. The UK has meanwhile prosecuted several people for terrorism-related offences involving extremist websites, some of them the very websites, hosted in the US, at the centre of the allegations against Ahmad, his lawyers say.

The US and UK extradition laws introduced by the Labour party after 9/11 have become a major concern in parliament, and this case highlights it again. A US campaign to suggest there is no discrepancy in standards between the two countries has been in high gear for some time, and was deployed again by various US spokesmen on the BBC yesterday, confusing the issue. But as Menzies Campbell, himself a lawyer, pointed out in one of the many interviews dominated by US spokespersons, this is just not true.

Ahmad’s words from prison are an unforgettable indictment of the British system that has failed him, through incompetence and Islamophobia.

“Eight years without trial is like living on death row. It’s like you are living every day for a tomorrow that might or might not come. And it has been very, very difficult… Detention without trial is the most unimaginable type of psychological torture.”

Ahmad’s case is not unique in Britain today, and its impact on others has been devastating. Men like Haroon Aswat have suffered complete breakdowns and removal to a mental hospital. And in the special unit of Long Lartin prison are other Muslim men equally affected by the long, slow failure of the system. One, Talha Ahsan from south London, is in a case linked to the same website as Ahmad. Another, Egyptian Adel Abdel Bary has gone through the same ordeal for even longer – 12 years. Next week the ECHR will give its judgment on the future of them all.

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