Camp X-Ray Britons sue over detentions
By Severin Carrell
03 March 2002
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The US and British governments will be accused in court tomorrow of illegally detaining five British Muslims who are being held without charge in Cuba.

In a two-pronged legal challenge in London and Washington DC, lawyers acting for several of the detainees will claim that the US has broken a series of international conventions on legal and civil rights by failing to let lawyers visit the five men and holding them without charge.

In the High Court, lawyers representing the British prisoners will accuse ministers of illegally collaborating with the US authorities by allegedly allowing MI5 officers who interrogated the five detainees to share their findings with the US intelligence services.

The court applications will add to growing political and legal pressure on the US to lift their ban on legal and family access to the five Britons, who have been in US custody and under interrogation since early January.

The US refuses to allow relatives, lawyers, MPs or British diplomats to visit Camp X-Ray, despite admissions by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, that few of the 300 detainees in Cuba will face trial and that the British detainees are likely to be sent home.

The family of Shafiq Rasul, 24, one of three detainees from Tipton near Birmingham, became extremely worried after he revealed in a letter home that he had lost three stone in weight. They believe Mr Rasul was the emaciated prisoner shown on BBC2's Newsnight programme being taken for interrogation strapped to a wheeled stretcher.

However, there were indications last night that ministers are stepping up their efforts to help the British prisoners after the Law Society and Bar Council publicly condemned their detention last week, and asked Tony Blair to intervene.

A friend of the Rasul family, Mushtaq Ahmed, said they were hopeful that their pleas for better medical care and food were now being heard. "There are good diplomatic moves which have been made, and we're a lot more optimistic than we were before," he said.

In the High Court tomorrow, the lawyer for Feroz Abbasi, 22, from Croydon, will claim that ministers breached the Human Rights Act and a United Nations convention on legal rights by effectively collaborating with the US decision to hold her client in Cuba without trial.

His lawyer, Louise Christian, will apply for a judicial review of the Government's role in the affair. "The British government aided and abetted the detention in unlawful circumstances by sending MI5 agents to interrogate my client and by passing that information to the US authorities," she said.

In Washington, meanwhile, attorneys acting for Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, 20, also from Tipton, will submit fresh applications asking a district judge to force the US authorities to give lawyers access to their clients and inform them they are being legally represented. The judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, rejected a similar application six days ago and gave the US government three weeks to respond.

Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born US lawyer who is leading the US legal team, said: "There is only one possible reason they would refuse to tell them they're being represented: they want to coerce involuntary statements from them. We have been unable to find any indicators that any of the British people are anything like terrorist suspects."