Legal News

David Remes, Who Dropped His Pants in Yemen, to Leave Covington

By Dan Slater

David Remes, a Covington & Burling partner, lowered his pants on Monday at a conference in Yemen to demonstrate the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Covington & Burling partner David Remes, who made Law Blog headlines last week for removing his pants at a news conference in Yemen, is leaving the firm, according to the Legal Times, which reported the news over the weekend. Remes will reportedly devote himself exclusively to human rights litigation.

Last week, we reported that Remes (Columbia, Harvard Law), who’s representing 15 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay, removed his pants at a news conference in Yemen. Remes was attempting to demonstrate what he feels are the inappropriate body searches that detainees are undergoing several times per day.

“At the press conference in Yemen — this is a society where the rule of morality is so strict — I wanted to drive home the degree of humiliation that these searches cause by illustrating a typical body search,” Remes told the LB. “The physical abuse they can stand. The verbal abuse they can stand. But when the military punishes Muslim men by shaving off their beard, or by forcing them to disrobe — for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine. . .I wish people paid as much attention to the suffering and torment in Guantanamo as they paid to the way I sought to dramatize it.”

Remes reportedly announced his resignation from Covington on Friday. “My departure is the inevitable outcome of my human rights work at the firm in the past four years, which became a consuming passion,” he said in a statement. Remes said in his statement that he had informed the firm in May of his intention to leave.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).