In this series, we delve into the incredible story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was detained at the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp without charge for over a decade. We hear Mohamedou’s story as extracts from an event hosted by the University of Bristol’s Human Rights Implementation Centre to mark the 20th anniversary of the facilities establishment – an event that also put the spotlight on the significant role Bristol researchers have played in reducing incidence of torture around the world. Mohammedou’s defence lawyer, Nancy Hollander and Professor Sir Malcolm Evans, joined Mohamedou on stage and continue the conversation here.
To wrap up this extraordinary series, we look at the prospects for closing Guantánamo, the need for mechanisms that hold States accountable for their crimes – and what the facility’s legacy means for international human rights. For the last time, criminal defence lawyer, Nancy Hollander, and Professor Sir Malcolm Evans come together to discuss how the United States of America ignored international human rights treaties – and what can be learnt from the role the University of Bristol’s Human Rights implementation Centre already plays in reducing incidence of torture around the world.
For further reading: “Guantanamo, Torture and Mechanisms for Change.”
If you’re interested in related study or research, please have a look at our LLM Human Rights Law and our PhD in Law.
Image Credit: University of Bristol
Transcript:
00:00:05 Prof Malcolm Evans
Hello and welcome. My name is Malcolm Evans, and I’m professor of public international law at the University of Bristol. I’m also Co director of its human Rights Implementation Center. And I’m also the former.
00:00:20 Prof Malcolm Evans
Chair of the United Nations Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture.
00:00:27 Prof Malcolm Evans
This is Guantanamo Bay, closing the door. It is episode four of a short series of podcasts calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
00:00:41 Prof Malcolm Evans
Guantanamo Bay was opened in 2002.
00:00:46 Prof Malcolm Evans
It was first announced that the camp would close in 2009.
00:00:51 Prof Malcolm Evans
But it didn’t.
00:00:53 Prof Malcolm Evans
In 2018, indeed an order was made to keep it open indefinitely.
00:01:00 Prof Malcolm Evans
In 2021, however, the intention to close was once again announced, but that intention is yet to be realized.
00:01:10 Prof Malcolm Evans
Mohammadu was a Mauritanian citizen who was detained at Guantanamo for 14 years without charge.
00:01:19 Prof Malcolm Evans
Nancy Hollander, an internationally renowned criminal defence lawyer, represented him across much of that time.
00:01:30 Prof Malcolm Evans
In this podcast, Nancy and I will talk about issues arising from Guantanamo Bay, its continued existence, the prospects for its closure, and what can be done not only in relation to Guantanamo, but more generally, to try to ensure people in detention.
00:01:51 Prof Malcolm Evans
And not subject to torture and ill treatment.
00:01:57 Prof Malcolm Evans
Nancy.
00:01:58 Prof Malcolm Evans
If I can turn to you.
00:02:00 Prof Malcolm Evans
Could I ask?
00:02:02 Prof Malcolm Evans
First of all.
00:02:03 Prof Malcolm Evans
A question that seems to have been asked many times.
00:02:08 Prof Malcolm Evans
But we still do not seem to have a wholly satisfactory answer. Why has Guantanamo Bay not yet been closed, despite all the announcements that have been made, that it will be? And of course the opprobrium which it now attaches to the treatment of people who have been held.
00:02:28 Prof Malcolm Evans
There.
00:02:29 Nancy Hollander
I appreciate that question. It’s difficult to answer because there are so many reasons why Guantanamo has not closed. President Obama announced that he would close it within a year. He did not do that. And as I’ve said in the previous podcast, his Justice Department.
00:02:49 Nancy Hollander
Appealed the cases that.
00:02:52 Nancy Hollander
The detainees were winning in the US District Court in Washington when they filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus and then many of the detainees left were from Yemen. Other countries had had managed to get their people out, many of them still there were Yemeni and.
00:03:12 Nancy Hollander
During Obama’s reign as president.
00:03:16 Nancy Hollander
A Nigerian man flying over Detroit, MI, tried to set his underwear on fire. He was captured and it turned out that he had been trained to do this and was trying to blow up himself in the plane by a Yemeni man who interestingly, was raised.
00:03:36 Nancy Hollander
For a good part of his life in Las Cruces, NM.
00:03:40 Nancy Hollander
So once they determined that it was a Yemeni who had trained him, President Obama said none of the Yemenis go.
00:03:48 Nancy Hollander
And they were stuck there. So that stopped the process. For those people, Obama started something called the Periodic Review Committee. He started it. And I think in 2011 it didn’t get funded till 2013. Mohammadu went before it in 2015.
00:04:07 Nancy Hollander
And was released. That’s not a court. It’s six intelligence agencies who determine whether the person is still a significant threat to the US at this point, half of the people of the 37 now who remain have been cleared for release and have not gone.
00:04:26 Nancy Hollander
Home. Well then, we had President Trump, so we didn’t have any action there except one man who had already entered into a plea. El Darby. And who’s back home in Yemen.
00:04:38 Nancy Hollander
Or Saudi? I’m not sure which. Then Biden, President Biden said the same thing. We’re going to close Guantanamo, but it requires political will it requires using.
00:04:50 Nancy Hollander
The your political position and being willing to use it to close Guantanamo, and that has not been there because there’s resistance to closing it from, I would say, just about all of the Republican Party and some Democrats. So out of fear and not wanting to.
00:05:11 Nancy Hollander
To not keep the Democrats in power, it all becomes a matter of power. At the end. It has not been closed. He has finally just begun setting up something in the State Department and envoy who can begin to look at the prisoners who have been cleared for release and tried to find homes for them.
00:05:32 Nancy Hollander
But even when they find homes or send them home, As for example in Mohammadi’s case, he was released to Mauritania, his home. But obviously a deal was made with Mauritania not to give him a passport, so he didn’t get one for three years. And on the day of his.
00:05:52 Nancy Hollander
The third year anniversary, the President of the country called him in and handed him a passport and said he was sorry, but the US had not permitted him to have a passport before that. the US holds so much power over all these countries that it’s difficult.
00:06:08 Nancy Hollander
Both, but it can be done. I believe Guantanamo can be closed. All the people who have been cleared for release, they can find homes. The others. We don’t have anything called forever prisoners in the United States. Absurd. They have to get out. And the ones who are left, who have actual charges.
00:06:29 Nancy Hollander
Their cases have to be resolved in some way that is fair and provides due process. It can happen.
00:06:37 Nancy Hollander
You’re familiar with this in other countries. What is the relationship of other countries to what the US has done? And of course, what’s supposed to happen?
00:06:49 Prof Malcolm Evans
Well, I have to say one of the one of the things that I’ve always found difficult in the time that I was working with with the.
00:06:57 Prof Malcolm Evans
The UN on these issues, I suppose. Well, a number of things. You know, first of all, there was nothing that we could do directly in relation to the US itself with the Committee of which I was a member, because the optional Protocol to the Torture Convention is an international treaty. It only binds those states which have ratified.
00:07:18 Prof Malcolm Evans
The Treaty and the United States has never become a party to the Optional Protocol, so there was nothing that we ourselves could do, which is a shame because.
00:07:31 Prof Malcolm Evans
The powers that we had as a committee were to go to any of the countries who were a party to our, to our Treaty, to go to any place where we considered that people were being detained and at risk of torture in order to see what was happening, to speak to them and then to make recommendations.
00:07:51 Prof Malcolm Evans
To the state about what should be done to reduce the risk of.
00:07:55 Prof Malcolm Evans
Culture now, certainly some other organs within the United Nations, raised the issue of Guantanamo. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture attempted to to visit, but I think there was difficulties.
00:08:09 Prof Malcolm Evans
The access and so on. But the beauty of the Committee of which I was a chair is that its powers of access were set down in law. And so once you became a party to it, you could go.
00:08:20 Prof Malcolm Evans
Anywhere and about half the countries in the world had signed up to this, and it’s just such a great shame that the US, not one of them, I wouldn’t mind asking you, Nancy, whether you think that there’s any chance that the United States one day might agree to participate in such a an instrument that would allow international monitors.
00:08:41 Prof Malcolm Evans
Access to all its places of detention, as of right whenever they wish. We certainly find that is a a very powerful tool to try to make sure that people are not ill treated in countries where that is possible.
00:08:56 Nancy Hollander
00:08:57 Nancy Hollander
Doubt that the US would allow any international overseers into its prisons? It’s hard enough for lawyers to find out what’s happening in our own cases. And of course, the fact that the US has not joined the International Criminal Court. I doubt that it.
00:09:16 Nancy Hollander
Still, because the US is is afraid of what would be found in its prisons. I mean, we still have people locked up in solitary confinement for years and years, which is itself torture. I believe the active torture in Guantanamo.
00:09:36 Nancy Hollander
Has ended what happened to Mohammadu and what we call the torture time 2004. Before we met him. But the US is not going to allow it. It never has and.
00:09:47 Nancy Hollander
I fear that it won’t.
00:09:49 Prof Malcolm Evans
I have to say it’s certainly the case that a number of countries which have joined the system I described when we’ve attempted to visit them have, shall we say, been rather shocked and surprised at what it was that they had committed themselves to for the very reasons that you give. We obviously always try to do, did do what was necessary to to to gain the access to which we were entitled.
00:10:13 Prof Malcolm Evans
But I think one of the other problems from an international position that we run into is that when one raises these issues with many other countries, the first thing they do is turn round and say, well, what about Guantanamo Bay? As if somehow the fact that this has taken place and that there is this history of torture and ill.
00:10:32 Prof Malcolm Evans
Treatment at Guantanamo and, of course at other sites, somehow somehow excuses them from being engaging in torture and ill treatment in their own places of detention. And I do think that one of the things that concerns me from a more global perspective is that the very many terrible things that do take place in many.
00:10:54 Prof Malcolm Evans
Prisons, police stations, detention centers and the like around the.
00:10:58 Prof Malcolm Evans
World somehow have.
00:11:00 Prof Malcolm Evans
What shall we say? Forgotten or left behind because of the ability to point towards Guantanamo, as if somehow the fact that this is done by the United States legitimates, or which of course it never can? What takes place in other parts of the world?
00:11:18 Prof Malcolm Evans
And so I think there has become a a danger of it becoming something of a shield behind which other states have been able to hide in order to justify their own mill treatment of detail.
00:11:29 Prof Malcolm Evans
These I think one of the things that you know, I’m a lawyer. You’re a lawyer and it really feeds into this point too, is whether at times you do, you think people expect too much of lawyers, obviously, must do what they can. But there are more than it takes more than lawyers to solve some of these problems at the end of the day, lawyers.
00:11:49 Prof Malcolm Evans
Are often seen as people who are brought in to put things right that have gone wrong. But what about trying to stop things going wrong in?
00:11:57 Prof Malcolm Evans
The first place.
00:11:59 Prof Malcolm Evans
Do you think there are more, more things that more people could or should be doing than empowered to do to try to make sure that things like this don’t happen, that Guantanamo bays are never constructed again and there’s greater transparency and honesty about the ill treatment that takes place in places of detention?
00:12:20 Nancy Hollander
Malcolm, I do think that people assume that the law solves everything, and frequently I have to say to people, and I’m sure you do, the law is not omnipotent. It can’t solve every.
00:12:32 Nancy Hollander
Problem. It can only do a limited amount which is not to say that lawyers couldn’t shouldn’t continue to struggle and seek what I call miracles just because you got to keep trying everything. But there’s a lot that people can do in the US where we have representation in Congress.
00:12:53 Nancy Hollander
People need to be getting to their Congress people and telling them you have to vote to close Guantanamo 10 I believe it was 10. I could have the number wrong. Congress people wrote to President Biden and said we have to close this.
00:13:08 Nancy Hollander
This.
00:13:09 Nancy Hollander
Giving other countries the right to do this, it is something that could happen to our service people in other places because they’ll say, well, it happens in the US, everyone should be out there in one way or another, writing to Congress, people talking about it, telling people.
00:13:29 Nancy Hollander
That it still exists so that they understand that everyone has to play a role in making sure these things don’t continue to happen around the world.
00:13:40 Prof Malcolm Evans
I think one of the things that that struck me, I know you’ve said before that when you.
00:13:45 Prof Malcolm Evans
First were introduced to Mohammedou. You know, he threw his arms open and said my lawyer. That’s that’s wonderful. But I suppose one of the things that’s troubled me in much of the work that I’ve done around the world is that it’s terrible to have to say this, but I’m afraid it’s often the case. Is that not all lawyers can be trusted? Not all doctors can be trust.
00:13:51
Because.
00:14:07 Prof Malcolm Evans
You know, not all judges can be trusted to do the right thing in these situations. Sometimes they’re under terrible pressures themselves and don’t do the right thing and act as professionally as they should when they have the opportunity to do so. How important is it? Is it that we really try to build effective?
00:14:26 Prof Malcolm Evans
Systems, structures, rules of law support those who try to do the right thing. If we are trying to prevent torture and ill treatment from taking place.
00:14:36 Nancy Hollander
It is important that when people say to me, as they sometimes do well, your country does it.
00:14:42 Nancy Hollander
Why are you here telling us anything about torture? And my answer is usually we have to start somewhere, and I I can’t solve what happened earlier, but we can all work together to make sure it doesn’t happen again in the US and anywhere else and.
00:15:03 Nancy Hollander
In whatever form you can do in your country for lawyers, honesty and ethics are important and I am.
00:15:12 Nancy Hollander
And go back to Colonel Couch, who was a prosecutor. There were about five or six other prosecutors, by the way, who quit Guantanamo and said we’re going to have nothing to do with this. That’s a brave and difficult thing for someone to do who’s in that position, but something that has to happen. People have to stand up.
00:15:32 Nancy Hollander
Their government, and it’s hard. It’s difficult.
00:15:36 Nancy Hollander
But we have to support people. We, as lawyers, have to support people who do that. Even people on the other side who say I can’t do this, we have to make sure those people don’t protect it.
00:15:48 Prof Malcolm Evans
It’s an interesting one, isn’t it? And I absolutely relate to to what you say. One of the things that struck me in many of the places of attention that I visited around the world.
00:15:57 Prof Malcolm Evans
Just how is it that you know people who they’re not monsters? They’re often just people trying to do their jobs in their their normal walks of life. It’s what they’re there to do, can become so insensitive to what’s going on around them that they just don’t recognise that what they are seeing and indeed what they’re becoming.
00:16:18 Prof Malcolm Evans
A participant in his is wrong and needs to be challenged and the costs of that challenge can be, you know, incredibly high.
00:16:25 Prof Malcolm Evans
What do you think can be done to try to empower that very thing that you described to support people when they stand up in these difficult situations and if you like, recognise the struggles that they actually have in calling out these practices?
00:16:40 Nancy Hollander
I believe that we as our certainly my group as defense lawyers, have to stand.
00:16:47 Nancy Hollander
Up with them.
00:16:48 Nancy Hollander
And say, maybe they did the wrong things before said the wrong things, but they’re standing up now if they need a defense, if they need.
00:16:58 Nancy Hollander
Since we go to them, I have learned. Interestingly a lot about the military through the course of my work in Guantanamo, I’d.
00:17:07 Nancy Hollander
Never been around.
00:17:08 Nancy Hollander
The military before I thought they were just all bad people who went to war. Well, they’re terrific lawyers, terrific defense lawyers. I have a naval captain now.
00:17:19 Nancy Hollander
In charge of my other case, a Navy captain is just.
00:17:22 Nancy Hollander
Below an ad.
00:17:23 Nancy Hollander
Role in that system and we had another one who once said to me I have the best of all jobs. I in the Navy and I can fight against the Navy and that’s a case where 17 naval sailors were killed in that case. And yet they are.
00:17:43 Nancy Hollander
Really working hard on the defense now in Mohammadi’s case because we never had a charge. We never had any military lawyers. But because I thought he might be charged at one point, I contacted one lawyer.
00:18:00 Nancy Hollander
Who was working on one of the other cases and I said to mohammadu, if you ever see him going to the other guy, just know that you can talk to him and he will relate what you say to me and you can trust him. And if you ever get charged, I want him to be the lawyer we work with.
00:18:20 Nancy Hollander
And I found in another case I had that the military lawyers bought hard for their clients.
00:18:29 Nancy Hollander
Even though their clients were accused of doing things contrary to the military, and I have to say we have to always give these people a shout out and support them, but individuals have to take apart. There are people who have in my country, in your country, there are people who’ve really.
00:18:49 Nancy Hollander
Stepped up trying to get Guantanamo closed. Journalists who have worked on getting it close.
00:18:55 Nancy Hollander
Closed.
00:18:56 Prof Malcolm Evans
But isn’t that part of it? It’s see and past the stereotypes, isn’t it? The number of times when I’ve been in prisons or other places of detention I’ve wanted to speak to detainees and the guards or the security people have come up to me said, well, you can’t talk to them. They’re just too dangerous. You mustn’t go anywhere near them. And you think, really. Yeah. If you see people as a threat.
00:19:18 Prof Malcolm Evans
Then quite often they become a threat if you see people.
00:19:21 Prof Malcolm Evans
As shall we say, bad people? Well, that’s the way that you begin to see them. What? You seem to be describing is needing to be a little bit more open to look past the stereotypes that we have of people in order to understand a little bit more about the realities that they’re trying to achieve, who they are, what they’re trying to do in order to try to.
00:19:42 Prof Malcolm Evans
Make it easier both to call out bad practice, but also to understand what the reality is that people are actually facing to listen to people and try to understand it from a more human perspective on both sides of those.
00:19:56 Prof Malcolm Evans
Equations.
00:19:57 Nancy Hollander
I absolutely agree with you and I I think two really good examples come out of Mohammadi’s case. One is Colonel Couch, the other is Steve Wood, who was his guard in 2005 and who was told he’s very dangerous. Be careful. And he describes how he learned that wasn’t true and how he became a close friend of Mohammed.
00:20:19 Nancy Hollander
Was that, as I said, a Lawrence Topham at the Guardian, did a beautiful documentary of the two of them. It’s called my brother’s.
00:20:28 Nancy Hollander
And it’s on YouTube. It’s easy to find, and it’s an example of what you’re talking about, of someone who and he has gone back to other soldiers who were working with him and said.
00:20:42 Nancy Hollander
We were wrong.
00:20:43 Nancy Hollander
We were just wrong.
00:20:45 Nancy Hollander
And those people need to be supported.
00:20:48 Prof Malcolm Evans
It’s really all about seeing the human in each other, isn’t it?
00:20:51 Nancy Hollander
It is. It is. We’re all one people on this planet. You and I have won the lottery of birth that we were born in the countries we were. Other people didn’t have that advantage. But we’re all humans.
00:21:06 Nancy Hollander
We’re all one race. We’re all one people and the more we see that that’s true, the better we’ll get along. I know that that sounds like it’s a very easy answer. And of course it isn’t and it isn’t the answer, but we would go a long way if we saw other people as just.
00:21:27 Nancy Hollander
Other people and not the enemy.
00:21:29 Prof Malcolm Evans
Absolutely.
00:21:30 Prof Malcolm Evans
To bring it back before we close to Guantanamo. Would you care? Dare. Put a time on how long it will be before you think it finally will be. History as an open camp. It will always be with those who are there. It’s never going to go away, but at least it can be closed. You have said it.
00:21:51 Prof Malcolm Evans
Then be closed. How long do you think it will take?
00:21:53 Nancy Hollander
I don’t know how long it will take. I do believe it can be closed or changed. There is now some plea negotiations. They’ve been in the newspaper. The five people charged with the 9.
00:22:04 Nancy Hollander
11 case have started some plea negotiations and they, as part of their negotiations, have said, according to the press, that they want to stay there because they have a communal system. They’ve worked out if they’re going to be there the rest of their lives, they want to be together, not taken to some supermax prison where they’ll be in solitary confine.
00:22:25 Nancy Hollander
And so it may change into a military prison for those few people who are going to be there the rest of their lives, probably. But the rest of them, they can get out. I wish at the beginning of President Biden’s term, I thought it would happen in the next couple of years. Now I’m more pessimistic.
00:22:45 Nancy Hollander
But we have to keep going. We have to keep working to make it happen and around the world too.
00:22:50 Prof Malcolm Evans
And if there were one?
00:22:52 Prof Malcolm Evans
Lesson that you would like those listening to this to take away or to reflect on from the 20 who knows years of Guantanamo. What would it be? What should people really have learned from Guantanamo Bay? What should they when they look at it? Think on.
00:23:13 Nancy Hollander
Well, there are two things. Number one is lawyers. My answer is never give up. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen, but you have to keep working. You have to keep going on every case until you get a good result. If you possibly can, or the best you can.
00:23:33 Nancy Hollander
And the other thing is for us to all realize that this should never have happened in the US. the US should never have gone through this particular tragedy. And again.
00:23:48 Nancy Hollander
I don’t say we should look forward because entirely, I think that suspected tortures should be prosecuted and the court should have to do that with all the due process to which they’re entitled. But that’s what the Treaty requires. But we all have to be aware that these things can happen.
00:24:09 Nancy Hollander
So quickly, so easily that we all have to just have on our consciousness to not let it happen at the beginning and work so hard.
00:24:20 Nancy Hollander
For that to be true in every country that, as Colonel Couch says, and as you just said, every human being should be treated with dignity.
00:24:28 Prof Malcolm Evans
Thank you, Nancy. I think that’s a good place to end. Thank you very much for your contribution and the conversation.
00:24:34 Nancy Hollander
Thank you, Malcolm. Excellent questions and excellent conversation. I appreciated it so much.
00:24:41
If you’ve.
00:24:42 Prof Malcolm Evans
Been inspired by the conversations in this podcast and want.
00:24:46 Prof Malcolm Evans
To find out.
00:24:47 Prof Malcolm Evans
More about the torture prevention work at the University of Bristol’s Human Rights Implementation Center and the role you could play as a researcher as a student or as a potential partner.
00:25:01 Prof Malcolm Evans
Pleaseusewhistle.ac.uk/research Guantanamo or the link in the podcast description.
00:25:13
To find out.
00:25:14 Prof Malcolm Evans
More about this work.
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