Amicus Brief – al-Hela v. Biden

Human Rights First, alongside Reprieve US and the law firm of Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC, filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the petitioner in Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman al-Hela v. Biden at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The case’s central question is whether the Constitution’s Due Process Clause extends to individuals detained at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. al Hela has been held at Guantanamo without charge or trial since 2004.

Human Rights First’s brief highlights the inadequacies we’ve observed within the Guantanamo Periodic Review Board (“PRB”) system, to argue that the PRB is no substitute for meaningful judicial review of the legality of an individual’s detention at Guantanamo. Human Rights First has been a nongovernmental observer of the PRB proceedings since its inception in 2014. The PRB, as the brief explains, does not protect against arbitrary detention because 1) it is a discretionary process subject to political influence, and 2) its procedures (including reliance on torture-derived evidence) are wholly inadequate to protect against wrongful detention.