Organisations like CagedPrisoners should be promoted and pushed to front page news all over the world. They’r one of the few that are giving our imprisoned brothers & sisters a voice & exposing the world to the news that media overlook, news that exposes the double standards of these so called 1st world countries.

On Saturday 27 September 2008, 46 year old Saudi Arabian citizen Khalid Al-Fawwaz completed his tenth year in prison without trial, whilst he fights extradition to the US on allegations of terrorism.

Khalid Al-Fawwaz arrived in the UK in 1994 with his family and was granted political asylum shortly afterwards for his activities against the Saudi regime. He settled in North London and ran the Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC), a non-violent political organisation advocating reform in Saudi Arabia. Throughout the mid-1990s the ARC was known all over the world for its weekly fax communiqués criticising political, economic and human rights deterioration in Saudi Arabia.

The ARC was said to have been close to Usama Bin Laden and Khalid Al-Fawwaz was said to have arranged several media interviews with Bin Laden for Western journalists in the 1990s. Some media reports even labelled him as “Bin Laden’s de facto ambassador in the West.” Whilst Al-Fawwaz has never denied knowing Bin Laden, there is no evidence to suggest that there was anything illegal or criminal in his relationship with him.

On 7 August 1998, two US embassies were destroyed by truck bombs in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania. Six weeks later, on 22 September 1998, Khalid Al-Fawwaz was arrested at his London home by British police under terrorism legislation. Five days later, he was released without charge after the police found insufficient evidence to link him either to the East Africa bombings or to any other terrorist or criminal activity.

Nine hours after he arrived back home on 27 September 1998, officers from Scotland Yard’s Extradition Squad arrested him on his doorstep pursuant to an extradition request from the US. The US extradition warrant accused him of involvement in a “worldwide conspiracy with persons unknown to wage ‘jihad’ against the USA.” He has been detained in prison ever since. He has no family in the UK.

In December 2001, the House of Lords ruled that there was no legal obstacle to prevent his extradition and sent his case to the Home Secretary for the final decision. Six years later, in March 2008, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith signed documents ordering his extradition. He is currently appealing against that decision.

If extradited to the US, he faces the possibility of ending up in Guantanamo Bay with one of his co-accused, Khalfan Khamis Mohammed, who is already there. If he ends up on the US mainland, he faces spending the rest of his natural life in solitary confinement.

Over the last ten years, media reports have described him as “using extensive legal processes to delay extradition by many years”, as if somehow the honourable thing for him to have done was to consent to his extradition so he could spend the rest of his days in Guantanamo Bay.

He has two co-accused in the UK. Adel Abdel-Bary, a 48 year old Egyptian lawyer, has been in prison since July 1999 fighting extradition. 50 year old Mr X died in London on 16 July 2008 after being released on grounds of ill-health in 2006. By then Mr. X had spent seven years in prison without trial, during which he developed the cancer that eventually killed him.

No other prisoner in the modern history of Britain, not even during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has been detained without trial for as long as Khalid Al-Fawwaz. No other modern Western democracy, not even the USA, detains people for 10 years without trial like Britain does. Maybe the Chinese can give some tips to the British on how to cover up their human rights record before the 2012 London Olympics?