Guantanamo inmate told: You can't return to UK, you've been away too long
Pressure is being piled on to Gordon Brown to allow Jamil el-Banna, a British resident who the US authorities have recently said may leave Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, to return to Britain. The Home Office are said to be ludicrously claiming that el-Banna has been out of Britain for four and a half years and, therefore, his permission to stay in Britain has lapsed.
Quite what Mr el-Banna was supposed to do about this during his years of forced detention we are not told, however, a parliamentary written reply from Liam Byrne, the Immigration minister, cast doubt on Mr Banna's right to return to Britain. It said: "Mr Banna was recognised as a refugee by the UK in 1997 and was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2000. That leave has now lapsed."
It is a simply ludicrous stance to take and I can smell the hand of John Reid behind this instantly.
This row has broken out during the Deputy Leadership of the Labour party elections and certain candidates have had lots to say about the disgrace that is Guantanamo Bay. Harriet Harman has been especially blunt:On Tuesday, lawyers for the businessman, who fled Jordan for Britain in 1994 alleging ill treatment, applied for a judicial review, arguing that the Home Office cannot deny Mr Banna's right to return to Britain as a refugee. His MP, the Liberal Democrat frontbencher Sarah Teather, said it would be "idiotic" to refuse Mr Banna entry to Britain because his leave to stay had lapsed. She said: "He has been away from the country for four-and-a-half years because he has been locked up in Guantanamo Bay. His family are torn between being excited that he might be released and being afraid that he might be sent to Jordan. All they want is for him to come home."
Mr Banna's solicitor, Irene Nembhard, said she had asked the Home Office to confirm that he would be able to return to the UK, but had been told that Mr Reid had yet to decide on the case. She said: "As a refugee recognised by the UK, his status does not lapse. He has a legal entitlement to return to the UK."
She told a Labour deputy leadership hustings meeting: "There is no other country in the world that is doing this, other than the US. If it was another country, we would be protesting and we would have a Security Council resolution condemning Guantanamo."If Brown wants to make a clean break from the Blair years then he would do well to start with Guantanamo. This Gulag has always been a stain on the conscience of the West, and Blair referring to it as "an anomaly" was never a sufficient condemnation of George Bush's attempt to subvert the law and declare that he had the right to arrest people, declare them enemy combatants, and hold them indefinitely without trial or ever proffering any evidence before any court to prove their guilt.
The US broke away from the UK precisely because they did not believe in the power of King's, a power that Bush has sought - enthusiastically supported by the Republican movement - to claim as his own.
Brown should distance himself from the whole matter and declare that Habeas Corpus continues to be a British virtue and that no man will be considered guilty until he has been found to be so by a jury of his peers.
He would do well to begin by allowing Jamil el-Banna to return home to his children.
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