Open Letter from banned lawyer for Bahrainis detained in Guantánamo

Bahrain: an open letter
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, 15 June 2011
A lawyer for Bahrainis detained in Guantánamo is now excluded from a country where he was once welcome. Joshua Colangelo-Bryan tells the story.

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan is a consultant to Human Rights Watch

The Bahraini government effectively barred me from entering the country in early May 2011. What makes this of more than personal interest is that I have a longstanding relationship with the country, as a lawyer who from 2004-07 represented the Bahrainis detained at Guantánamo Bay.

This involved over 3,200 hours’ work on my clients’ behalf, including twelve trips to Guantánamo – often despite great efforts made by the United States to keep me and other lawyers from going there. I saw clients through suicide-attempts and hunger-strikes. When my clients were sure Bahrain had forgotten them, I promised this was not true and remained committed to advocating for the “Bay Bahrainis”, as they were called.

My clients had strong allies inside Bahrain. During a visit to Manama in 2005, Sheik Adel al-Maawda invited us to parliament and delivered there an impassioned speech about my clients’ rights to due process and humane treatment. He said that my law firm had done more for his compatriots than anyone else, and led the other parliamentarians in a standing ovation. …more