Discrimination

Highlights of Our Work

Naji Hamdan, who was detained and tortured at a black site in the United Arab Emirates, and his son.
 

In 2015, Advancing Justice-LA began litigating a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case seeking information about the United States government’s involvement in the overseas detention, interrogation, and torture of U.S. citizen Naji Hamdan. Between August and October 2008, Mr. Hamdan was detained and tortured at a black site in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), where he was living at the time. Mr. Hamdan believes that his detention and torture in the U.A.E. was at the behest of the U.S. government, pursuant to its well-known practice of “proxy detention” of terrorism suspects abroad. This and other practices adopted by the government in the name of counter terrorism after 9/11 have had a disproportionately harmful effect on Muslim Americans, like Mr. Hamdan. Through the lawsuit, Advancing Justice-LA and co-counsel the ACLU of Southern California are challenging the government’s withholding of key documents that would shed much needed public light on the U.S. government’s involvement in Mr. Hamdan’s detention and torture abroad, as well as serve to deter such inhumane practices going forward.