Judges criticize Guantanamo

last updated 8 January 2015

London

A panel of three British judges ruled this week that the U.S. detention of a British subject as an “enemy combatant” at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay was “legally objectionable.” The family of Feroz Abbasi, one of seven British citizens caught fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, sued to try to compel the British government to intervene. The judges refused to do so, but in a strongly worded message to the U.S. government, they said it was objectionable that a British national “should be subject to indefinite detention” with no oversight by any court. Tom Ridge, U.S. director of homeland security, said releasing “active terrorists” would only serve to “bring harm and devastation once again to the civilized world.”