The Working Group found that Abu Zubaydah’s continuing imprisonment without charge or trial constitutes arbitrary detention, via the flagrant abuse of the relevant articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and expressed “grave concern” that the very basis of the detention system at Guantánamo — involving “widespread or systematic imprisonment or other severe deprivation of liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law” — “may constitute crimes against humanity.” As in his first term in office, when he sealed Guantánamo shut, and also, crucially, shut down the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, established under Obama, ensuring that there was no one within his administration who had direct responsibility for Guantánamo, now he is back in power no one in his administration has been assigned responsibility for the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, which, for the last year, has been almost entirely ignored as Trump has chosen, instead, to ignore the 15 men still held, and to remake the prison as a theater of performative cruelty in the vile “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office. He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.
Author: Andy Worthington
Published at: 2026-01-19 23:00:20
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