Join Us on Dec. 4 for the Last Monthly Vigils of 2024 for the Closure of Guantánamo
Campaigners call for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House during the monthly coordinated global vigils for the prison's closure on February 7, 2024.
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By Andy Worthington, December 2, 2024
This Wednesday, December 4, campaigners across the U.S. and around the world will be holding the last coordinated global monthly vigils of 2024 for the closure of Guantánamo, focusing our attention on the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been unanimously approved for release by high-level U.S. government review processes — for between two and four years, and in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years — but who are still held.
This Wednesday’s vigils are hugely significant, as they provide us with the last opportunity, before President Biden leaves office, to call attention to the plight of these men with any hope that it will lead to their release before Donald Trump once more moves into the White House, from where, it seems certain, he will lock Guantánamo shut as he did during his first four years in office.
A list of the global vigils taking place on December 4, 2024.
The reason this week’s vigils are so important is because, under U.S. law, Congress has to be notified 30 days before any release from Guantánamo takes place, which means that any planned releases require Congress to be notified by December 20, so that, after the 30-day period, they can be freed the day before Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Shamefully, the Biden administration has spent the last 14 months failing to arrange for the release of these 16 men. Under any functioning legal system, a judge would have been able to address this festering injustice, but, because the review processes are purely administrative, no option exists for the prisoners to ask a court to order the government to act.
Last October, a plan to resettle most of these men in Oman — all Yemenis, who, under U.S. law, cannot be repatriated — was shelved at the last minute, apparently when a plane was already on the runway at Guantánamo, because of the attacks in southern Israel that took place on October 7, 2023. The Biden administration reportedly regarded it as unacceptable to free the men because of the perceived "political optics" of doing so.
Few news outlets even paid attention to this story, and none of them questioned the Islamophobic basis of refusing to release Muslims from Guantánamo because of the actions undertaken by other Muslims elsewhere in the world.
Unforgivably, the Biden administration refused to set a new date for the release of these men; hence the last-minute efforts by lawyers to seek to persuade the government to take urgent action to address their plight.
The updated poster showing how unforgivably long the 16 men approved for release have been held as of December 4, 2024.
If you can join us on Wednesday, please do. We have been holding monthly vigils since February 2023 (see photos from, and a report about the latest vigils here), and we have persistently tried to highlight the plight of these 16 men, through regularly updated posters showing how long they have been held since the decisions were taken to approve them for release. We can only regard it as a profound failure of the whole of the U.S. mainstream media that not a single media outlet has seen fit to focus on the stories of these men, and to ask why it is apparently regarded as acceptable to continue to imprison men held for between 17 and 22 years without charge or trial, as though the decisions to approve them for release are essentially meaningless.
We can only conclude that the lack of mainstream media interest reflects a fundamental lack of concern for the rights of Muslim men that began after the 9/11 attacks, and has not fundamentally been repudiated ever since. Is it possible to imagine any other group of men imprisoned without charge or trial for so long — and then not being freed despite being unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes — without it causing any sense of outrage whatsoever?
Please also note that, on December 6, we will be sending two letters to President Biden calling for these men’s release — one consisting of U.S. and international signatories, and the other consisting of signatories from the U.K. If you represent an organization with an interest in signing this letter, please do get in touch — and please also feel free to do so if you are an individual in a relevant field — a political representative, a lawyer, academic, psychologist or journalist, for example — or a well-known public persona.
