Nowhere To Go report

The case of Monir Awad, a Swedish citizen of joint Palestinian and Lebanese decent, is an extremely interesting case study of the global detention network in the War on Terror which has come into existence since 2001. His case individually highlights nearly every aspect of this network and the specificities of its various permutations. These specificities include everything from detention without charge and the failure to produce any prima facie case for it, profiling, rendition, refoulement, abuse and torture whilst in detention, proxy prisons, the complicity of foreign security services in these detentions and lastly attempts to force links in interrogation between prisoners and Al-Qaeda.
The case of Monir Awad highlights all these points, and how this system is beyond the law, operates with impunity, and with either the knowledge or at the behest of western governments and most importantly the injustice and human rights abuses it perpetrates.
Monir Awad has now been detained twice in the past four years. His first detention in 2006 occurred when he accidentally found himself in the conflict zone of Somalia when Ethiopian forces invaded in December 2006. He was visiting there from the UAE for a short stay, evaluating whether it would be suitable for him and his pregnant wife (who was travelling with him) to settle. It was at this point that war broke out and in attempting to escape to Kenya, as the Swedish authorities advised, they were captured by Kenyan forces and their first experience of detention, rendition and abusive interrogations began.
The interview conducted by Cageprisoners in Sweden with Monir Awad in October 2009 is the source for the information presented here. Our conclusions reached in this report have all been corroborated many times by various sources since the beginning of the “War on Terror”.