Thursday 19 February 2015

Former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Hicks said to be ‘thrilled’ after US review court strikes down conviction

David Hicks has won a legal challenge to his terrorism conviction before a US military court.

The US court of military commission review struck down the March 2007 conviction of the former Guantánamo Bay prisoner in a unanimous ruling.

US lawyer Wells Dixon said Hicks was aware of the decision and was “thrilled”.

“He is free to live his life without this conviction hanging over his head.”

Dixon said Wednesday’s decision was “a powerful reminder that he committed no crime, he is innocent of any offence”.

“In that sense he is finally free of Guantánamo,” he said.

Hick’s Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, said the decision confirmed his client’s innocence, the ABC reported.

“It means David Hicks’s conviction has been set aside and he’s been declared an innocent man, so it confirms what we knew all along,” he said.

“David Hicks was innocent and that has formally been recorded by the military commission itself.”

Hicks, 39, was held at Guantánamo Bay from January 2002 until May 2007.

He had pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism in a plea bargain in which all but nine months of his seven-year sentence was suspended and he was allowed to return home by the end of that year.

In 2014, an appeal court ruled that material support was not a legally viable war crime for the special wartime court at Guantánamo known as a military commission.

Prosecutors argued his conviction should still stand because he agreed not to appeal as part of the plea deal, an argument rejected by the court of military commission review on Wednesday.

The US government has not said whether it will attempt an appeal and a Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment.

For Hicks, the decision is the end of an odyssey that began when he travelled to Pakistan in 2000 and joined the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

He later travelled to Afghanistan and attended a training camp run by al-Qaida. He was captured by the Northern Alliance, turned over to US forces and spent about five years at Guantánamo.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/19/david-hicks-wins-appeal-against-terrorism-conviction
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