Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Stafford Smith
OBE
Stafford Smith in 2010
Born
Clive Stafford Smith

(1959-07-09) 9 July 1959 (age 65)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Columbia University
OccupationLawyer

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE (born 9 July 1959) is a British attorney who specialises in the areas of civil rights and working against the death penalty in the United States of America.[1] He worked to overturn death sentences for convicts, and helped found the not-for-profit Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans. By 2002 this was the "largest capital defence organisation in the South."[2] He was a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, based in Houston, Texas.

In addition, he has represented more than 80 of the detainees held as enemy combatants since 2002 at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As of February 2021, a total of 40 men are still held there.[3]

In August 2004, Stafford Smith returned from the US to live and work in the United Kingdom. He is the co-founder of Reprieve, a human rights not-for-profit organisation. He left after 15 years, and has now established a new non-profit called 3DCentre. In 2005 he received the Gandhi International Peace Award.

  1. ^ Knight of the living dead Archived 4 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine The Daily Telegraph – 30 January 2005
  2. ^ "The Great Defender" Archived 30 June 2006 at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, 11 March 2002. Retrieved 22 April 2016
  3. ^ "Who's still held at Guantánamo". The Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved 6 February 2019.