Originally posted on closeguantanamo.org
In our new article on our website, 24 Years of Guantánamo, our co-founder Andy Worthington promotes the global vigils taking place this weekend, on Saturday January 10 and Sunday January 11, marking the unforgivable 24th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, where 15 men are still held, although none are detained on anything resembling a legally sound basis.
Six of the 15 are held without charge or trial, six face charges in a broken trial system, the military commissions, that are incapable of delivering justice, one is in legal limbo after being judged mentally unfit to stand trial, another, severely disabled, agreed to a plea deal, and another is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial 17 years ago in which he refused to mount a defense.
Twelve vigils are taking place — nine across the US, including outside the White House, and three at other locations worldwide, in London, Brussels and Mexico City. You can check out all the photos from the three years of the vigils on Andy’s website here.
Please join us if you find this ongoing but largely forgotten injustice intolerable. As Andy explains in the article, “Although the existence of the ‘war on terror’ prison has been largely lost in a fog of amnesia for more years than most of us care to remember, it still remains hugely significant that, for 24 years now, and on an ongoing basis, successive U.S. governments have lawlessly claimed that they have the right to hold people at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if they are to be charged and tried, to do so in a broken system, the military commissions, that, after 24 years, must be irrevocably judged to have proven itself incapable of delivering justice.”
If you can’t be present in person, feel free to join us by sending in a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster, via our Gitmo Clock website, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open. The poster marks how long Guantánamo will have been open on January 11 — 8,767 days — as part of an ongoing photo campaign we’ve been running every 100 days, and on the anniversaries of the prison’s opening, since 2018.
Send photos to info@closeguantanamo.org.
We will also, of course, be campaigning against Donald Trump’s use of Guantánamo to hold migrants, in the “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office for the second time last January. Around 730 men have been held, although all, or almost all of them have subsequently been repatriated or sent back to ICE detention facilities on the US mainland. Last month, a judge confirmed that the entire policy was illegal, although, probably in spite, the administration subsequently sent 22 Cuban migrants there, whose current status is unknown.
Please support us with a donation if you can
If you can, please support our work in 2026, as we continue to struggle against the indifference of Donald Trump to the fate of the 15 men still held at Guantánamo — and also maintain vigilance against any efforts on his part to continue sending migrants there.
To do so, make a donation via PayPal here.
If you can make a regular monthly donation, that would be especially welcome. Please tick the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.
Thanks, as ever, for your interest in our work.
The “Close Guantánamo” team