A top human rights lawyer has told the Greenbelt Festival this weekend that more than 200 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been on hunger strikes for nearly three weeks now.
Clive Stafford Smith, is a lawyer representing a number of clients at the base, and only returned from Guantanamo a week ago.
Smith told the thousands gathered at the Greenbelt Christian Festival at Cheltenham racecourse, “The world needs to know that these guys are going to die in the next two to three weeks. They are starving themselves to death.”
The information regarding the detainees starving themselves was classified information until just two days ago by the US military, even though the hunger strike began nearly three weeks ago now.
Another hunger strike took place in July and ended with five prisoners coming within a few days of death.
The lawyer told Greenbelt that one client, a British Refugee from Ethiopia, Binyam Mohammed, revealed to him that 210 detainees had resumed the hunger strike from two months ago.
Mohammed told Smith, “They (the US military) have betrayed our trust. Therefore the strike must begin again. Some have already begun. . . . I do not plan to stop until either I die or we are respected. People will definitely die.
“We ask only for justice: treat us, as promised, under the rules of the Geneva Conventions for Civilian Prisoners while we are held, and either try us fairly for a valid criminal charge or set us free.”
Smith works as a legal director of Reprieve, a London-based human rights charity, and has spent the past three years providing legal assistance to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He was invited to Greenbelt to be part of the hugely diverse programme of events, aimed to give a world overview of the situations across the globe.
