<mediadc-video-embed data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1654885168223,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07c3-d172-a563-4feb224a0001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1654885168223,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07c3-d172-a563-4feb224a0001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"rawHtml":"
var _bp = _bp||[]; _bp.push({ "div": "Brid_54885040", "obj": {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"1025267"} }); ","_id":"00000181-4ec1-d590-a5f1-cef315cb0000","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedWith attorneys for Jordanian-American citizen Bassem Awadallah now telling the United Nations that Awadallah’s life is in serious danger, President Joe Biden must insist on his release from a Jordanian prison into U.S. custody.
As reported here multiple times, Awadallah has been imprisoned for more than a year on extraordinarily vague charges of sedition against Jordan’s King Abdullah II. He was convicted in a nonpublic, lightning-fast trial in a special quasi-military court without American legal representation and without being allowed to call his own witnesses or otherwise mount a defense. His U.S.-based family and their representatives say he has been in solitary confinement after being tortured.
Now his attorneys are asking the U.N. to intervene because, they say, a May 19 “royal decree” from the king “will likely incite others to do serious harm to or cause the death of Dr. Awadallah all in the interest of nationalism or to win favor with the King.”
That sentence came in a May 27 letter from attorney Michael J. Sullivan, who is of the law firm of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, to the “Special Rapporteur on Torture” in the “Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.” Specifically, Sullivan writes that when Abdullah called Awadallah a “traitor” in a royal decree, “King Abdullah has enlarged the target already on Dr. Awadallah’s back” — and all “based on knowingly false information.”
For the first time since I began covering this case, I have been able to see the exact nature of the treatment to which Awadallah has allegedly been subjected. In letters to a series of officials in Jordan, the United States, and the U.N., Sullivan wrote that Awadallah was “severely beaten, threatened with electric shocks, threatened with other unspeakable acts and has had threats lodged against his family members.” He was “slapped and beaten and kicked while prone on the floor. Dr. Awadallah was threatened with sodomy and electrical shocks.” When he asked for medical treatment, wrote Sullivan, “prison officials mocked his requests.”
Jordan, of course, has categorically denied the mistreatment. It did, however, acknowledge that while Awadallah’s Jordanian lawyer was able to provide a “written defense statement,” he was not able to present it during the trial itself because the special court, appointed by the king’s own ministers, “found that this evidence was not relevant to the subject matter of the case and not useful.”
Clearly, this trial behind closed doors, without witnesses or the ability to present evidence, violates Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Jordan explicitly has committed — the terms of which say that “any hearing must take place in open court before a competent, independent and impartial tribunal [my emphasis added].”
Earlier this week, Sullivan told me that the charges involve conversations Awadallah had with the king’s troublesome brother, Prince Hamzah. Sullivan said that every time Awadallah, who had been far closer to the king than to Hamzah, was invited to meet with Hamzah, Awadallah told the king’s prime minister in advance of the meetings and then reported back to the prime minister afterward about the subjects discussed. Nonetheless, despite that transparency, the king’s other aides decided Awadallah was a threat.
“There are claims that there are recorded conversations,” Sullivan told me. “But Bassem’s [Jordanian] attorney has never been able to get copies to verify their authenticity.”
The good news, according to Sullivan, is that personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Jordan have insisted on meeting with Awadallah on “a regular basis,” even though they “are not allowed to meet him in private.” Nevertheless, “I gather that those visits have been a great comfort to Bassem.”
“We also believe,” he said, “that in visits the king has had here in the United States, members of Congress and the administration have raised Bassem’s case to the king directly.”
Yet Awadallah remains in solitary confinement, with the king effectively having hinted to prison officials that the prisoner’s life is worthless because he is a “traitor” — which in that culture is often a death sentence.
That’s why Biden himself must get forceful and demand the release of this U.S. citizen. If Awadallah is repatriated to the U.S., with travel restrictions forbidding him to visit the Middle East again, he can be no threat to Abdullah — not that he ever was a threat to start with. As a matter of U.S. sovereignty and the duty to protect our own citizens, Biden should say we consider Awadallah a purely political prisoner, against all international norms. If the king wants to keep his considerable U.S. assets, some of them ethically dubious, he should release Awadallah — now.
