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Seeking Justice Before the Inter-American Commission: Victims Hand Biden Administration an Opportunity to End Impunity

Today, the NYU Global Justice Clinic (GJC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed arguments on behalf of four victims and survivors of the U.S. extraordinary rendition and torture program—Binyam Mohamed, Abou El Kassim Britel, Bisher Al-Rawi, and Mohamed Bashmilah—in Mohamed et al v. United States, pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In their submission, the four men provide voluminous evidence that U.S. agents and their proxies in the Gambia, Jordan, Pakistan, and Morocco, forcibly disappeared, detained, interrogated and tortured them. The U.S. government now has an opportunity to respond to the men’s allegations; the first for the Biden-Harris administration to distinguish itself from the Trump Administration, which thumbed its nose at international human rights and mechanism for their enforcement.

In their submission, the four men ask that the Commission hold the United States accountable for their forced disappearances, secret detention and torture. This is the men’s last chance to secure official acknowledgement and apologies from the United States for what it did to them. Their earlier effort, the U.S. federal court case, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., was summarily dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009, soon after the Bush and then-Obama administrations intervened in the litigation to assert the “state secrets” privilege, arguing that further consideration of the men’s case would be harmful to U.S. national security interests.

Counsel for the men are Steven Watt of the ACLU and Gabrielle Apollon and Margaret Satterthwaite of the GJC, as well as student advocates Helen Jennings, Caroline Marks, and Samantha Morris.

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