Guantanamo and the Legal Battle Against Torture (hybrid event)

Book talk on ‘The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture’ by Prof Lisa Hajjar. This is a joint event with Manchester International Law Centre.

Prof. Lisa Hajjar will discuss her new book, The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture, with a particular focus on the legal battles over the treatment of people detained at Guantanamo.

Those who took up the fight against the government over torture, forced disappearance, protracted incommunicado detention, and invented law-of-war offences for use in the military commissions were lawyers. Hajjar will explain why hundreds of legal professionals—JAGs and attorneys from corporate law firms, human rights lawyers and solo practitioners, law professors and their students—were galvanised to defend the rule of law that was upended by the torture policy and enlisted in what turned into a war in court.

The last front is the 9/11 case; the five defendants were disappeared and tortured by the CIA for years before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006. That case, which started in 2008 and remains ongoing, is proof that torture and justice are utterly incompatible and Guantanamo’s legacy is failure.

The Speaker:

Lisa Hajjar is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department, University of California – Santa Barbara. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who contributes to multiple fields in the social sciences and humanities, including Middle East Studies, American Studies, and Law and Society. Her current research focuses primarily on the US “war on terror,” particularly around the issues of torture, targeted killing, and Guantanamo. She is the only social scientist who has traveled to Guantanamo (14 times to date), where she conducts research and writes about the military commissions.