Huda Al-Sarari was forced into exile after her work documenting human rights abuses by U.S.-backed Emirati forces garnered global attention.
“At some point there’s going to have to be recognition of what has happened in Yemen on all sides, and any sort of accountability mechanism in a post-conflict Yemen has got to include the counterterrorism abuses that were committed,” said Jennifer Gibson, a lawyer who leads the extrajudicial executions project at the U.K.-based group Reprieve, which has worked to amplify Al-Sarari’s advocacy efforts outside Yemen, including by nominating her to two prestigious human rights awards.
“That’s why Huda’s investigations are so important, because of what she was able to document in real time and the evidence she was able to gather. That evidence doesn’t go away.”
“U.S. torture was thought to be historical, and what Huda’s work is showing us is that all the U.S. has done from the first half of the war on terror to the second half is to realize, ‘Hey, actually, it’s much better to outsource the torture, outsource it to our partners, and then we don’t have any accountability, our fingers are not on it,’” Gibson added. “When you don’t grapple with your own accountability for your own actions, and you don’t hold your government to account for the torture it has committed, it’s just going to keep doing that in one way or another. The impunity just breeds more impunity.”
Read the full story in The Intercept.
