New Hope for Britons in Guantanamo

Lawyers acting for the remaining Britons at Guantanamo Bay will this week file habeas corpus lawsuits in Washington demanding access to their clients and swift court hearings to challenge their continued detention.

The petitions, triggered by last week's US Supreme Court ruling that the 595 detainees do have constitutional rights, come amid signs that the Bush administration's policy over Guantanamo is close to collapse. In the wake of the ruling, officials suggested that prisoners might be moved to a jail on US soil, possibly Fort Leavenworth in Texas.

Pentagon sources said yesterday this was now considered unlikely. 'Leavenworth is already full of American servicemen convicted of crimes,' one source said. 'Apart from the fact we don't want them mingling with suspected terrorists, it is badly overcrowded.'

Since the first prisoners arrived from Afghanistan in January 2002, the Pentagon maintained that the camp existed in a 'legal black hole', with detainees protected by neither the Geneva conventions nor US law. They could be held indefinitely without trial or access to lawyers, and tried by US military commissions subject to none of the normal procedure.

Last week the Supreme Court demolished this position by a 6-3 majority, saying 'aliens, no less than US citi zens' are entitled to invoke the US courts' authority at Guantanamo.

On Friday two Britons, Moazzem Begg, 36, and Feroz Abbasi, 23, became the first to file for habeas corpus, with the administration agreeing to let them see lawyers. Begg, a father of four from Birmingham, was abducted from a house in Pakistan by CIA agents in October 2001, and lawyers fear that he may have signed a false confession: according to media leaks, interrogators claim he planned to launch an unmanned aircraft from Suffolk to drop anthrax on Westminster.

Yesterday his father, Azmat, a retired bank manager, said he was worried about his son's health. 'He has been confined for a long time. I want to see him home straight away. He should be medically and physically examined and, if he has done anything wrong, take him to the court. If not, he should be released. I do not know why they are keeping him there.'

The two remaining Britons whose suits will be filed this week are Martin Mubanga, 29, who was arrested in Zambia, and Richard Belmar, 24. Belmar's sister, Jeanette, said he went to study in Pakistan in June 2001 and, after the 9/11 terror attacks, said he was coming home. Nothing more was heard until his family were told that he was in Guantanamo in October 2002. He has not written a letter since last September.

Other forms of legal pressure are now mounting over Guantanamo. The military commissions may never take place, with a suit already filed in Seattle challenging their legality. The Supreme Court ruling may mean they can be held only if their rules - condemned by Tony Blair last week - are radically revised.

Meanwhile, the International Bar Association, based in Washington, issued an opinion by two leading international lawyers. It says the administration's repudiation of the Geneva conventions was a breach of the conventions themselves, while its attempts to justify torture and degrading treatment during interrogations, set out in a series of formerly classified memos, amount to a grotesque misreading of the law.

Some of their contents, said Oxford University professor Vaughan Lowe, were of the standard that he might expect from 'a below-average student'.