Calls For His Release
On 22 October 2008 a coalition of organizations including Montreal's Anglican Dioscese, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International issued a press release about their plans to sponsor Djamel's request for admittance to Canada as a refugee.
On February 10, 2009, CBC News confirmed that was among the five Guantanamos captive to have a refugee sponsoring group working on his behalf. The other four men were Maassoum Abdah Mouhammad, a Syrian Kurd, and Hassan Anvar and two other Uyghur captives from Guantanamo.
On April 17, 2009, the Anglican Journal quoted human rights workers and church officials about the delay in Ameziane's repatriation. Janet Dench of the Canadian Council for Refugees speculated that Ameziane's repatriation had been stalled by the new reviews of the Guantanamo captives ordered by United States President Barack Obama.
“No one has formally and officially said that it is waiting for the U.S. to do their internal review but … Once they’ve done the reviews, then they’ll be starting to think about ‘how do we find solutions for all of the people in Guantánamo and how do we involve these different other countries that might play a role?'”
Barry Clarke, Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Montreal, which is helping to sponsor Ameziane, wrote about how he responded to Canadians critical of the Church's initiative on Ameziane's behalf. He called Ameziane's captivity in Guantanamo "an injustice". He acknowledged that he couldn't guarantee that Ameziane was not tied to terrorism. But he said his workers, and other human rights groups, had looked into his background. The article quoted the conclusions of the Center for Constitutional Rights:
“As a foreigner in a land soon torn apart by conflict, he was an easy target for corrupt local police who captured him while he was trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Mr. Ameziane was then sold to U.S. military forces for a bounty.”
On March 30, 2012, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced it would be taking up Ameziane's case. According to The Jurist the IACHR "will investigate whether the US's failure to transfer Ameziane is in compliance with international human rights law."
Read more about this topic: Djamel Ameziane
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