Government Faces New Challange Over Torture Complicity
The judicial review will look into government guidance on interrogation
Tuesday 23 Feb 2010
By Ian Dunt
The government is facing a new challenge over its alleged complicity in torture today, as a coalition of legal and human rights groups fight a legal proceeding on its policy.
Reprieve is initiating a judicial review into the legality of the government guidance for agents interviewing prisoners aboard, which foreign secretary David Miliband has demanded be kept secret
"Advice given to agents cannot sensibly be deemed ‘classified’, as disclosing legal advice hardly betrays a national secret," said Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith.
"Rather, depending on what the policy was, it exposes those who sanctioned the advice to immense embarrassment."
Under cross-examination in court an intelligence agent known as Witness B referred to guidance issued by his superiors in relation to his interviews with British resident Binyam Mohamed while he was held by the CIA in Pakistan.
The judicial review will investigate the legality of that guidance, which is understood to exist in three forms.
One is thought to have been instituted on January 11th 2002. The second is thought to have been in force from 2004 onwards. Most human rights groups strongly suspect it is illegal, but the government refuses to release it into the public domain.
The final guidance was promised by Gordon Brown in March of last year, but has yet to emerge.
"It cannot take a year to come up with new advice – we could have written it for them in an afternoon," Mr Stafford Smith said.
"Agents in the field are still, apparently, required to rely on the 2004 policy. Meanwhile, the government is playing for time here, hoping that the issue can be punted past the election to the next parliament.”
Ten diverse examples of complicity are used to support the action: from British agents driving a prisoner around in a mobile interrogation unit in Iraq in the midst of his alleged torture, to urging prisoners to cooperate with their abusers, to threats of rendition, to knowingly feeding questions to prisoners who were being mistreated.
Richard Stein of Leigh Day & Co said: "There is compelling and copious evidence in the public domain that UK intelligence personnel have engaged with torturers in the interrogation of individuals detained in the 'war on terror' in a manner that can only sensibly amount to complicity.
"The UK government still fails to come clean about the extent of its involvement in these crimes. It is right that the Court should now be asked to scrutinise the government’s guidance to its own intelligence personnel and assess whether this is as the result of officially sanctioned policy."
The judicial review comes weeks after the court judgement into the release of paragraphs describing the interrogation of Mr Mohamed raised serious concerns about the British government's knowledge of CIA interrogation techniques.