The activism o f lawyers, the media and NGOs on the detainee torture issue was distinguished by its focus on state impunity, not individual victims. Factors such as the detainees' personal attributes, whether they seemed innocent or guilty and whether they had charismatic family members were not overtly material to determining civil society’s support for their cause. BIRW ’s Stanley explained civil society’s approach as “more about questioning the impunity o f the state in relation to the victim than the victim themselves” (Stanley, tel. interview 7 Feb. 2013). Similarly, the IFIRC’s Merali said: “I can't recall anyone ever saying ‘this poor person trapped in Guantanamo' and singling out some more than others” (Merali, tel. interview 5 Mar. 2013). Having said this, Muslim organisations did question whether the behaviour o f some human rights NGOs was influenced by the detainees’ Muslim identity. There was a sense that some transnational NGOs were initially reluctant to advocate for Guantanamo detainees at all because, in the words o f one Muslim activist, “there was almost a tacit acceptance that these are not really the type o f people you want to advocate for" (Merali, tel. interview 5 Mar. 2013).
Another feature o f civil society’s non-discriminatory approach to the issue of detainees who were tortured was that it did not, in general, accept the UK government's attempts to distinguish between its obligations to citizens and residents at Guantanamo Bay. In 2003, for instance, Amnesty International criticised the government’s decision not to help A1 Rawi and El Banna because they were not citizens as “questionable morally and legally” (Dodd 11 Jul. 2003). Peirce, who acted for UK citizens and residents, commented after the court in the Al Raw>i case found for the government (that it did not have to lobby for the release o f residents) that: “This is not an area where the government is entitled to discriminate and it has discriminated between nationals and residents” (Norton-Taylor 5 May 2006).I2j Similarly, in NGO reports calling for UK government accountability over the treatment o f UK citizens and residents, the organisations did not differentiate between the two groups (Amnesty International 23 Mar. 2010; Reprieve 10 Jun. 2008; REDRESS Dec. 2008; HRW Jun. 2010; Qureshi 10 Aug. 2005; 28 Mar. 2006; Apr. 2009; 19 Jan. 2011). This attitude was also apparent from media reporting on the residents, particularly The Guardian, which first reported
on the UK government's abandonment of A1 Rawi and El Banna in July 2003 (Dodd 11 Jul. 2003). UK civil society saw no difference in the state's responsibilities towards either category of persons, where their fundamental human rights - including the right not to be tortured - were being transgressed by a foreign power.
Civil society actors based their challenge of UK government policy differentiating between citizens and residents on moral and legal grounds. Morally, UK intelligence services were closely involved in the original detention and early interrogations of some residents, particularly Al Rawi, El Banna and Mohamed. In addition, many of the residents had close connections to the UK. This was in terms of their lives and families being embedded in UK society, because of the length of time they had lived there and because many had UK wives and children. Media reporting of El Banna, for example, emphasised his family's UK links. Before he was arrested El Banna, his wife and children “enjoyed a very happy and settled life in London"; his son wrote to Prince Charles asking for help to bring his “daddy" home (Taylor 18 Mar. 2006). One human rights lawyer explained the connection of residents to the UK as:
They were denizens, they were such embedded residents that they were a hop and skip away from being citizens. Their links with the UK were very strong without the technicality of citizenship. Some had British wives, British children - you were not looking at people who had just come off the boat or tourists, these were people who had been an integral part of British society for a long time. There was no question if and when these people were released, the place they would come back to would be the UK, not their country of birth (Human rights lawyer ‘A’, tel. interview 5 Feb. 2013).
The other grounds for UK civil society’s non-discriminating position on citizens and residents were legal and normative. This was founded in the universality underpinning international human rights law, including the Universal Declaration o f Human Rights
(UDHR), of which the right to equality between nationals and non-nationals is a “critical manifestation" (Duffy 2008: 580). As noted in Chapter One, the universal application of international human rights law has influenced state practice on citizenship in the post-World War Two era. According to traditional conceptions, citizenship defines bounded populations with a specific set of rights and duties, excluding “others" on grounds of nationality (Soysal 1994: 2). However, a growing body of scholarship argues that the emergence of the international human rights regime has resulted in the corrosion of traditional notions of nation-based citizenship and the absolute distinction
between citizens and non-citizens is being called into question (Soysal 1994: 1; Sassen 2006, 2008: 307; Nash 2009: 18; Benhabib 2004: 144). It is argued that a “new and more universal concept of citizenship has unfolded in the post-war era, one whose organising and legitimising principles are based on universal personhood rather than national belonging” (Soysal 1994: 1).
The legal notion of universality refers to states having obligations to protect the international human rights of non-nationals within their jurisdictions (Duffy 2005: 289). It is arguable, however, that the post-UDHR questioning of the citizen/non-citizen distinction in relation to human rights has influenced ideas more widely about states’ obligations to protect individuals’ human rights, in situations where there is a connection to those states. I contend that these ideas of universality influenced the civil society discourse on UK residents detained overseas. Where a link could be established between the state and the individual, claims could be made that obligations for protection existed. The literature on the modern expansion of understandings about citizenship draw attention to the role of global civil society in driving universalist ideas and in giving human rights “an expanded role in the normative regulation of politics as politics becomes more global” (Sassen 2006: 286). I draw attention to such contests between civil society and the state over the boundaries of citizenship occurring at the domestic level. In the face of resistance from the UK government, local civil society actors successfully pressed for more universal notions of citizenship in terms of the state’s obligations to defend individual human rights, to include residents with strong connections to the state.
Why was civil society non-discriminating in its approach to detainees? A number of factors influenced its position. They included ideas about the universality of international human rights and the UK's rights culture, forged out of its prior history of terrorism and internment and shaped by its membership of a powerful regional human rights regime. Civil society’s attitude was also informed by domestic debates occurring around the discriminatory internment laws targeting non-citizens (overturned in the
Belmarsh case). The fact that these debates were occurring created an opening in the UK's political system that meant it would be easier for supporters of the residents detained at Guantanamo to gain traction on their cases which, they argued, had parallels with what was occurring domestically. One other possibility was the effect of the sheer
volume of cases of detainees alleging they were tortured with the complicity of the UK's intelligence agencies. This may have helped focus civil society more on the state's actions and on issues of general principle - and less on the particular victim.