Arkin Mahmud is a Uyghur refugee best known for the seven and a half years he spent in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

Guantanamo Bay detention camp The Guantanamo Bay detention camp ( es, Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and Gitmo (), on the coast of Guant ...

s, in

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...

Joint Task Force Guantanamo Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) is a U.S. military joint task force based at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba on the southeastern end of the base. JTF-GTMO falls under US Southern Command. Since January 2002 the command has ...

counter-terrorism Counterterrorism (also spelled counter-terrorism), also known as anti-terrorism, incorporates the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, business, and intelligence agencies use to combat or el ...

analysts reports Mahmud was born on July 1, 1964, in

Ghulja YiningThe official spelling according to (), also known as Ghulja ( ug, غۇلجا) or Qulja ( kk, قۇلجا) and formerly Ningyuan (), is a county-level city in Northwestern Xinjiang, People's Republic of China and the seat of the Ili Kazakh A ...

, Xinjiang, China. Arkin traveled to

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...

in order to look for his younger brother Bahtiyar Mahnut. He is one of approximately twenty-two captives from the Uighur ethnic group. By the summer of 2009, Arkin's mental health had deteriorated so profoundly he wasn't offered sanctuary in Palau. For some time in 2005, during his stay in Guantanamo, he was held in

solitary confinement Solitary confinement is a form of imprisonment in which the inmate lives in a single cell with little or no meaningful contact with other people. A prison may enforce stricter measures to control contraband on a solitary prisoner and use additi ...

. He won his

habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...

in 2008. Judge

Ricardo Urbina Ricardo M. Urbina (; born 1946) is a former United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Education and career Urbina earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in 1967. He received his ...

declared his detention as unlawful and ordered to set him free in the

. Until his transfer to

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

on March 23, 2010, Arkin Mahmud had been held at Guantanamo for more than seven and a half years despite it became clear early on that he like the other Uyghurs in Guantanamo was innocent.

Writ of habeas corpus

writ of habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...

, Arkina Amahmud v. George W. Bush, was submitted on Arkina Amahmud's behalf.

Mental health

In July 2009, the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

country of

Palau Palau,, officially the Republic of Palau and historically ''Belau'', ''Palaos'' or ''Pelew'', is an island country and microstate in the western Pacific. The nation has approximately 340 islands and connects the western chain of the Caro ...

offered sanctuary to all the remaining

Uyghur captives in Guantanamo Starting in 2002, the American government detained 22 Uyghurs in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. The last 3 Uyghur detainees, Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghupur and Saidullah Khalik, were released from Guantanamo on December 29, 2013, and lat ...

, except Arkin. Arkin's younger brother Bahtiyar declined the invitation of sanctuary in Palau in order to stay with Arkin. Due to reports from camp guards that Arkin had broken the camp's rules, from 2005 he was held in isolation from other captives. Arkin told Elizabeth Gibson, his habeas counsel, "I know I'll die in here. In China, at least I would have a trial and sentence."

Granted asylum in Switzerland

Switzerland granted

political asylum The right of asylum (sometimes called right of political asylum; ) is an ancient juridical concept, under which people persecuted by their own rulers might be protected by another sovereign authority, like a second country or another enti ...

to Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut on February 4, 2010. Swiss authorities helped them settle in

Canton of Jura The Republic and Canton of Jura (french: République et canton du Jura), less formally the Canton of Jura or Canton Jura ( , ), is the newest (founded in 1979) of the 26 Swiss cantons, located in the northwestern part of Switzerland. The capita ...

. Historian

Andy Worthington Andy Worthington is a British historian, investigative journalist, and film director. He has published three books, two on Stonehenge and one on the war on terror, been published in numerous publications and directed documentary films. Artic ...

, author of ''

The Guantanamo Files The Guantánamo Bay files leak (also known as The Guantánamo Files, or colloquially, Gitmo Files) began on 24 April 2011, when WikiLeaks, along with ''The New York Times'', NPR and ''The Guardian'' and other independent news organizations, began ...

'' commented that Switzerland's grant of Asylum preserved the

Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

Presidency A presidency is an administration or the executive, the collective administrative and governmental entity that exists around an office of president of a state or nation. Although often the executive branch of government, and often personified by a ...

from political embarrassment, because all the Uyghurs had been offered a new home, except for Arkin Mahmud, and that the Swiss offer of asylum would complicate the habeas petitions of the four remaining Uyghur captives who had declined to agree to accept refugee status in Palau.

References

External links

From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

October 9, 2008
Judge Ricardo Urbina’s unclassified opinion (redacted version)MOTIONS/STATUS HEARING - UIGHURS CASES BEFORE THE HONORABLE RICARDO M. URBINA

Taking On Guantánamo
Connecticut Law Tribune, May 10, 2010 * Human Rights First
Habeas Works: Federal Courts’ Proven Capacity to Handle Guantánamo Cases (2010)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mahmud, Arkin Chinese extrajudicial prisoners of the United States 1964 births Living people Uyghurs Guantanamo detainees known to have been released