Guantanamo Bay: Then and Now

The detention without trial of nearly 800 men at Guantanamo Bay stands as a watershed event for human rights law.  Fifteen men remain at the facility more than twenty years later.  There have been only two convictions. The overwhelming majority of men were never charged with anything.  The United States tried to create a legal black hole where these men had no rights or access to courts.  The Geneva Conventions were suspended.  Torture occurred on a massive scale.  To mark the publication of Eric Lewis’s book Leaving Guantanamo: How One Country Brought Its Men Home From the Forever Prison by Cambridge University Press, the Bonavero Institute has brought together leading human rights advocates to discuss the legacy of Guantanamo and its resonance today.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception, where a selection of Abu Zubaydah’s art work will be displayed.

Eric L. Lewis

Eric L. Lewis is the author of Leaving Guantanamo: How One Country Brought Its Men Home From the Forever Prison, published by Cambridge University Press. 

Mr. Lewis has been a leading figure in international human rights law for the last quarter century.  He has represented Guantánamo detainees since 2002 in multiple contexts. He was lead counsel in litigation involving the treatment of hunger striking prisoners at Guantanamo and on behalf of a released Guantanamo detainee imprisoned in Morocco in breach of intergovernmental assurances.  He also served as lead counsel in a civil case on behalf of British detainees who brought suit for torture against the Secretary of Defense and Generals in the Chain of Command.  He has represented detainees from Kuwait, Xinjiang, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He conducted the final two Periodic Review Board hearings that resulted in the release of Fawzi Al Odah and Fayiz Al Kandari, who were thought to be “forever prisoners,” men who would never be charged or tried but never released.

He serves as Chairman of Reprieve US, a charity that actively litigates death penalty, indefinite arbitrary detention, torture and other human rights cases around the world. Working through Reprieve, he has been active in obtaining the release and repatriation of more than 70 Guantanamo detainees, negotiating with the US Government and foreign governments on repatriation of cleared detainees, as well as overseeing the Life After Guantanamo program that provides assistance to released detainees.

Mr. Lewis worked to obtain the release of a dual U.S.-Egyptian national sentenced to life in prison for blogging against the coup and brought suit against Egyptian leaders under the Torture Victims Protection Act. He has acted on behalf of capital defendants both at the trial and appellate level, including the individual accused in the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and others in Benghazi, who was acquitted on all counts of homicide. He has been a leader in efforts to obtain the release of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.  He has served as an expert witness in numerous foreign courts in extradition matters, including the extradition of Julian Assange.

Mr. Lewis also represents athletes and others who have been victims of sexual abuse by coaches and published numerous pieces regarding sexual abuse of minors in The New York Times, Esquire, ESPN.com and The Independent. He is a director of Independent Digital Media Limited.

He has lectured at Yale Law School and Hertford College, Oxford University regarding indefinite detention at Guantanamo.   He has written extensively about indefinite detention at Guantanamo, capital punishment, transnational repression and American politics. He taught criminal law as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center for more than a decade.

He is the Chair of Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, an international disputes law firm based in Washington and New York.

He is a graduate of Princeton University, Cambridge University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and Yale Law School (where he was Articles and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal).

Helen Duffy

Ed Fitzgerald

Maya Foa