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May 30, 2013

U.K. Admits to Holding Dozens Without Charge in Afghanistan 
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The British government has admitted to holding up to 85 people without
charge in Afghanistan. The prisoners have been jailed at Camp Bastion
for as long as 14 months, with no charges or indication of a pending
trial. Phil Shiner of Britain's Public Interest Lawyers denounced their
imprisonment.

Phil Shiner: "People have been detained indefinitely, incommunicado, no
one knows that they are where they are until today, their relatives have
not been able to see them, they have had intermittent contact with them
over the internet, they've had no access to lawyers, they have not been
charged, they are not going to be brought before a court and our common
law system has long recognized that that is completely unlawful and
there's always been the habeus corpus remedy requiring those holding
people in those circumstances to explain to a court why what they are
doing is lawful. That's is what is going to happen here at the end of
July." A British court will convene a hearing on the prisoners' fate in
July.

 

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