Guantánamo detainee Jumah al-Dossari attempted suicide in March. He says he has been tortured in custody, and is believed to have made numerous suicide attempts since he was detained, in January 2001. US officials have refused to give his lawyers any information about his current condition.

Lawyers visiting other detainees at Guantánamo in late March were told that Jumah al-Dossari had recently attempted suicide, for what may have been the 12th time, by slitting his throat. Official notes from Guantánamo which have recently been declassified also record the suicide attempt. Despite requests for information, his lawyers have been unable to determine his current condition.

US Navy commander Robert Durand, a spokesperson at Guantánamo, told US journalists earlier this month that there was a suicide attempt at the camp on 11 March and that the unnamed detainee is "clinically stable". He has also noted that a single detainee, believed to be Jumah al-Dossari, accounts for 12 of the 39 reported suicide attempts at Guantánamo.

Bahraini national Jumah al-Dossari was seized in Pakistan in late 2001 and held for several weeks by the Pakistani authorities. US agents then flew him to Kandahar airbase, in Afghanistan, and took him from there to Guantánamo. Jumah al-Dossari claims he has been tortured in custody. This has included beatings and death threats, prolonged isolation, exposure to extreme cold and sexual assaults.

On 15 October 2005, Jumah al-Dossari attempted to hang himself after going into the toilet during an interview with his lawyer. In November 2005 he told his lawyer that he had wanted to kill himself so that he could send a message to the world that the conditions at Guantánamo are intolerable. He added that he had tried to do it in a public way so that the military could not cover it up and his death would not be anonymous. This suicide attempt left him with a broken vertebra and fourteen stitches in his right arm.

Amnesty International Denmark takes action for torture free skies © AI Denmark

"It never, never crossed my mind that I’d end up being hauled half way across the world by the Americans to face torture in a place I’d never been - Morocco." - Benyam Mohammed al Habashi, UK resident / Ethiopian national, who was arrested in Pakistan and is now detained in Guantánamo Bay

Salah 'Ali Qaru finally emerged free from detention around midnight on 27 March. In nearly three years, the 27-year-old Yemeni was tortured in Jordan, flown from country to country, held for over a year in an unknown location and denied access to the outside world.

Salah 'Ali Qaru became one of probably hundreds of people caught up in the secretive and illegal US programme of "rendition". The CIA has used private aircraft operators and front companies to preserve the secrecy of their rendition flights, but nearly 1,000 flights have been identified as being directly linked to the CIA.

Salah 'Ali Qaru was then flown from his secret detention site to Yemen, where he was held for more than nine months without charge, before finally being charged with forging documents and released. He has never been charged with any terrorism-related offence.

His life has been destroyed. He has been traumatized by his ordeal. He has a two-year-old daughter he has never seen. His wife is destitute, living in Indonesia not knowing where he was for most of his detention. He doesn't know if he'll have the money or permission to return to his wife and child in Indonesia.

Salah Qaru's story and those of his country-men Muhammad Bashmilah and Muhammad al-Assad, who were also detained in the same secret facility, are just three of a handful of known cases. Potentially hundreds more remain completely secret. Renditions involve the transfer of people from one country to another in ways that bypass all judicial and administrative due process.

The rendition programme has delivered people into US custody, whether at Guantánamo Bay, detention centres in Iraq and Afghanistan, or secret CIA-run facilities known as "black sites" around the world. However, it is most commonly used to transport people to third countries, including those where they are at risk of torture or ill-treatment.

Officials sometimes present rendition as an efficient means of transporting terror suspects from one place to another without red tape. That so-called red tape is international law. International law that prohibits the sending of people to countries where they are in danger of being tortured, international law against arbitrary arrest and detention without charge or trial, international law against enforced disappearance.

The protestations of the US administration that they're doing nothing illegal are belied by the absolute secrecy surrounding the programme. The US Secretary of State has said that, "where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured." If the practice of torture and ill-treatment in custody is so great that the USA must seek assurances that the receiving state will not behave as it normally does, then the risk is obviously too great to permit the transfer.

Any company that is involved in these shadowy operations, such as Richmor Aviation that is believed to have leased a Gulfstream V plane for rendition, risks being complicit in abuses of human rights. Flight records show that the Richmor Aviation plane transported Italian citizen Abu Omar from the US military base at Ramstein in Germany to Cairo, Egypt in 2003. He remains in secret detention, possibly in Egypt. Private aircraft operators and leasing agents need to take every care that they do not lease planes that might be used in renditions.

The US programme of renditions must end and all governments must prohibit the transfer of anyone to places where they face torture or ill-treatment. All governments must ensure that their airports and airspace are not being used in renditions. All those detained in the so-called "war on terror" must be protected from torture and ill-treatment and charged and given a fair trial or released.