Clive Stafford Smith Photo: Photo courtesy Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
Clive Stafford Smith speaking truth to power
Rehabilitating the image of the west in the eyes of the world by bringing the rule of law back to lawless enclaves like Guantanamo Bay is the long-term goal of Clive Stafford Smith. Rosemary Hartill talks to him about his work
There are risks in doing this kind of work. Clive Stafford Smith is the legal representative of some eighty-five of the 780 or so prisoners that have been, or still are, held in Guantanamo Bay. Unlike some of them, he has not been tortured. But if he reveals publicly an allegation of torture without the permission of the US military censors, he could end up in gaol.
In February 2009, Stafford Smith wrote a memo to Barack Obama about the rendition and torture of a prisoner at Guantanamo represented by his charity, Reprieve. Before he could do so, the memo had to be passed through the team that decides what is ‘classified’, and therefore secret, and what is not. They allowed the memo out only when everything had been blanked out except the date, his name, and the subject of the memo – Re: Torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed by US personnel.
In effect the commander-in-chief was being denied access to material that would provide evidence that crimes had been committed by US personnel.
When Clive sent a copy of the blanked-out memo to the British government and the papers, the US authorities tried to prosecute him for contempt of court. In the end, after months of expensive, time-consuming and intimidating legal to-and-fro-ings, they dropped the attempt. Finally, Barack Obama received a version of the memo, cut by Clive himself in such a way that the censors accepted it.
Clive Stafford Smith applied to the Visionaries Project because he wanted to build an international coalition of civilian lawyers to bring the rule of law back to Guantanamo Bay.
Previously, he had spent more than twenty-five years as a lawyer representing people on death row. He had saved hundreds of lives and counts his clients among his friends. In 1999 he founded the charity Reprieve to help channel volunteers from Britain to support the work in the US against capital punishment.
His focus changed after seeing the West’s response to the Al-Qaeda attack on the New York twin towers in September 2001. The West, instead of practising the ideals it preached, started denying basic human rights to detainees held in lawless enclaves like Guantanamo Bay. To him, this was hypocrisy – hypocrisy that would fuel hatred and conflict.
Over the five years of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) award, he has focused mainly on trying to bring the rule of law back to Guantanamo and similar enclaves. This has meant not only representing detainees legally, but bringing their stories and the truth of what is being done in our names to a global audience. His audience is not only the law courts, but the court of public opinion.
‘The JRCT Quakers were the nicest people’, he says with a cheerful smile. ‘Their idea of a vigorous interview was like a gentle rubbing with a chamois leather.’ They wanted to give him £37,500 a year as an outright non-taxable donation. He thought he should only be paid the average income of the area where he lived – then £30,000 (he hadn’t yet moved to Dorset from London). He also thought it should be taxable. JRCT quietly persisted, leaving him to decide how to spend and use it best.
One of the aims of JRCT was to liberate people with vision from the treadmill of targets, financial reporting, and organisational administration that can drain energy, creativity and innovation. But on Reprieve’s website, Clive is listed as its director. By the end of 2010, Reprieve had twenty-three full-time staff and not only campaigns against capital punishment, but spends a substantial amount of time on Guantanamo and related enclaves. So has JRCT merely funded Clive to do what he might have done anyway – develop an organisation?
‘No,’ he says, ‘it was such a liberation to have a guaranteed standard of living. It freed me to build up Reprieve, but also to do a book*, and now another one.’ Though a figurehead at Reprieve, he says he is not an employee, and has no management responsibilities. Reprieve has other grants. He spends only two or three days a month at their London office, working mostly from his rural home, ‘the centre of the universe’, where he lives with his wife and small son, Wilf. Home is a thirty-minute drive away from Dorchester.
‘He shambled cheerfully into the interview,’ says one of the JRCT staff. ‘We’ve never seen the dark side of his soul. He’s remarkably optimistic. What keeps him going, I think, is his belief in the human spirit, goodness, Wilf – and cricket.’
With an unblinking missionary zeal, charm, persistence, single-mindedness and energy, he works seventy-hour weeks.
In the last five years, his frequent media appearances have helped raise public awareness of Guantanamo and other enclaves.
His first goal was to secure legal representation for all prisoners being held in law-free zones like Guantanamo, by matching prisoners with teams of civilian lawyers. In 2005, the names of only half of the 540 prisoners then in Guantanamo were publicly known, and not one prisoner in any of the US proxy prisons elsewhere, though it was thought their number could amount to several thousand.
In June 2004, the US supreme court ruled in a test case he brought with two other lawyers that prisoners had a right to a fair trial. Today, the names of all Guantanamo prisoners are known, and also the whereabouts of most ‘high-value’ prisoners held elsewhere.
A coalition of some 500 lawyers now give their services free, and each of the prisoners in Guantanamo has legal representation if he wants it. Clive uses test cases to establish key principles. But the Kafka-esque situation continues: he and other lawyers can take notes while in Guantanamo, but they cannot take them out. Instead, the notes are sent to a super-secret facility in Washington. If Clive wants to consult his own notes, he has to go to Washington.
Clive’s medium-term target was the gradual abolition of all law-free zones – identifying other Guantanamo-like facilities around the world, bringing them into the public eye, and learning who is being held there, so that litigation can then commence on their behalf.
The locations ranged from Eastern Europe to Djibouti. He believes that as a result of publicity and other factors, the majority of them – in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Thailand and Malaysia, at least – have now been closed. But over 1,000 prisoners are still held at the major Bagram site in Afghanistan.
In January 2009, Barack Obama issued an executive order saying Guantanamo would be shut. It raised prisoners’ hopes, but at the time of writing, the prison is still open. In November 2010, over fifty of the remaining 174 had been cleared by the US through their own processes, but were still being held. A major delay is the reluctance of other governments to take them.
But Clive Stafford Smith says the worst cause of delay has been Obama’s desire to seek consensus over the process of closure, and the embarrassment of evidence of torture and mistreatment becoming public, if prisoners are put on trial. To avoid the embarrassment of trials alleging connivance with torture and abuse, the British government, in November 2010, reached a mediated settlement with sixteen men held in Guantanamo.
That same month, the Democrats lost control of the US House of Representatives. ‘The issue of Guantanamo will be a total political football now,’ said Clive. ‘It will be a drawn-out battle to get the remaining prisoners released or on trial.’
He is not planning to give up. ‘To borrow from Richard Bach, my life’s work will not be over before my death.’
*Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons by Clive Stafford Smith is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007. £16.99.
