Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE (born 9 July 1959) is a British attorney who specialises in the areas of civil rights and the death penalty in the United States of America. He has represented some of the detainees held since 2002 at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as enemy combatants.

In August 2004, Stafford Smith returned from the US to live in the United Kingdom. He is the Legal Director of the UK branch of the human rights not-for-profit Reprieve. In 2005 he received the Gandhi International Peace Award.

Background

Born in Cambridge and educated at Radley College, he declined a place at the University of Cambridge to study as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied journalism. He next attended and graduated from Columbia University's Law School in New York City. He is admitted to practice in the state of Louisiana and in Washington, D.C.

Early law career

Stafford Smith worked for the Southern Prisoners' Defense Committee, based in Atlanta, now known as the Southern Center for Human Rights, and on other campaigns to help convicted defendants sentenced to capital punishment. He first came to British public attention when he appeared in Fourteen Days in May, a 1987 BBC documentary showing the last fortnight in the life of Edward Earl Johnson before he was executed in the gas chamber in Mississippi State Penitentiary. Stafford Smith had acted as Johnson's attorney and was seen desperately trying to halt the execution of the death sentence. In a follow-up documentary, Stafford Smith conducted his own investigation of the murder for which Johnson was executed.

In 1993, he helped set up a new justice center for prisoner advocacy in New Orleans; formerly the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, it is now known as the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. In 2002, he became a founding Board Member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (G.R.A.C.E.), a non-profit law office in Houston, Texas, designed to bring the methods developed by Stafford Smith at LCAC to the "capital of capital punishment". He was awarded an OBE for his contributions to the law and human rights.

Guantánamo detainees

Main article: Extraordinary rendition by the United States

Since returning to the UK, Stafford Smith has worked as the legal director of Reprieve, a British non-profit that is opposed to the death penalty. During his career he has lost six death penalty cases.

From 2002 Stafford Smith has volunteered his services to detainees held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay; he has assisted in filing habeas corpus petitions and lawsuits on behalf of 128 detainees. His clients have included Shaker Aamer, Jamil al Banna, Sami Al Hajj, Sami Al Laithi, Abdul Salam Gaithan Mureef Al Shehry, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Jamal Kiyemba, Binyam Mohammed and Hisham Sliti. In a BBC interview, when asked why he was representing detainees, he answered that "liberty is eroded at the margins".

It was during this period, in December 2004, that Stafford Smith prepared a 50-page brief for the defense of Saddam Hussein, arguing that Saddam should be tried in the U.S. under U.S. criminal law.

On 29 August 2005, Stafford Smith addressed attendees at the Greenbelt festival, a major UK Christian festival, telling them about the second hunger strike at Guantanamo. Stafford Smith warned that prisoners were likely to die soon. Due to restrictions imposed by the United States Department of Defense (DOD), lawyers' notes must be filed with an intelligence clearing house in Virginia, before release. Conversations with clients are considered classified, and cannot be discussed until they have been cleared. Smith had to wait until 27 August 2005 to publicly reveal that the hunger strikes had been started again on 5 August 2005. Two of his clients, Binyam "Benjamin" Mohammed and Hisham Sliti, participated in the hunger strikes. In an interview broadcast on the BBC television evening news on 9 September 2005, Stafford Smith said that one of the reasons for the second hunger strike was to protest the continuing imprisonment of children (juveniles under the age of 18) in Guantanamo Bay.

Stafford Smith contributed to The Guardian with an article on the significance of the U.S. Supreme Court's 29 June 2006 ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which found the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and military commissions unconstitutional, as the executive branch did not have the authority to set up a justice system outside the existing civil and military systems. Stafford Smith thought that George W. Bush should have been secretly relieved that the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, who supported the administration's appeal against the lower court's ruling, were in the minority. He wrote:

"In the end, I suspect there was a collective sigh of relief from the White House that the lunatic fringe did not prevail. The Bush administration has finally recognized that it must close Guantánamo but — for all that Bush bangs on about the importance of personal responsibility — it wanted someone else to take the blame."

Stafford Smith wrote a memoir about his experiences at Guantanamo, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (2007), which was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing.

Interviewed by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News on 26 March 2009, Stafford Smith said he would be astounded if 10 Downing Street did not know that his client Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, had been tortured during detention. He added: "I would go one step further: the torture decisions were being made in the White House, by the National Security Council, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice." He asserted that although the British had not carried out the torture, they were complicit in it. Stafford Smith concluded that, in trying to keep the torture allegations secret, the US authorities were "confusing national security with national embarrassment".

In July 2010, Stafford Smith accused former Foreign Secretary David Miliband of "fighting tooth and nail" to prevent the release of vital documents during the Binyam Mohamed case.

As of July 2011, Stafford Smith has secured the release of 65 prisoners from Guantánamo, including Moazzam Begg, a British citizen and the founder of Cageprisoners, to aid the reintegration of detainees into society. Stafford Smith was representing 15 additional detainees.

Awards

• Awarded the OBE in the 2000 New Years' Honours list "for humanitarian services in the legal field"
• Honorary Doctorate of Law by the University of Wolverhampton 2001, for his work fighting the death penalty in America
• Lifetime Achievement Award from The Lawyer Magazine (2003)
• Benjamin Smith Award from the ACLU of Louisiana (2003)
• Soros Senior Fellow, Rowntree Visionary (2005)
• Gandhi International Peace Award 2005, for his work representing Guantanamo detainees and campaigning against extraordinary rendition.
• "Gandhi International Peace Award citation". Gandhi Foundation. Retrieved 2008-10-21.
• Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award (2008)
• International Freedom of the Press Award (2009)
• International Bar Association's Human Rights Award (2010)
• Honorary Doctorate by Bournemouth University (2011)
• Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) by University of Bath (2011)

Publications

• Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America (Harvill Secker, 2012) EAN: 9781846556258
• Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007) Details his work for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and criticizes advocates of torture.
• The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Fighting the Lawless World of Guantanamo Bay (Nation Books, 2007) ISBN 1-56858-374-5
• Welcome To Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row, edited by Helen Prejean, Clive Stafford Smith, and Jan Arriens (Northeastern; 2nd edition, 2004) ISBN 1-55553-636-0

External links

• Reprieve UK - Stafford Smith is Legal Director
• Brief biographical summary, BBC website
• The Great Defender BBC News, 11 March 2002
• "Do Non-Americans Have Human Rights?", an interview in Mother Jones (magazine), February 23, 2005
• Vikram Dodd (August 10, 2007). "Clive is used to the US way, where people play things to the media. Maybe with Guantánamo that's what you need". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-08-11.
• "Clive Stafford Smith: US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons". Democracy Now! 19 May 2008
• Clive Stafford Smith, "Contributions", New Statesman