Next time superior-sounding politicians lecture us on the need to sign up unquestioningly to the shared values of liberal, democratic Britain, perhaps someone ought to raise a few caveats.
The recent speech by the MI5 chief, Jonathan Evans, at his alma mater, included this passage:
“Operating a security service within a liberal democracy does of course pose problems and occasionally dilemmas.... Given the pressing need to understand and uncover Al Qaida's plans, were we to deal (however circumspectly) with those security services who had experience of working against At Qaida on their own territory, or were we to refuse to deal with them, accepting that in so doing we would be cutting off a potentially vital source of information that would prevent attacks in the West? In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack.... we do not solicit or collude in torture. We do not practice torture. But we are operating in a difficult and complex environment.” [full text on the University of Bristol website, 15th Oct 2009]
Clive Stafford-Smith, a voice of conscience, had this to say about Evans's speech “It may well be that British agents do not soil their own hands with the apparatus of torture, but they certainly know that torture is going on, and loiter in the shadows while others apply the thumbscrews... Evans's agents could witness the crime of torture and do nothing to prevent it. They could then step into the interrogation room and question the suspect. He suggests that these issues have presented ‘a real dilemma’ for the service. Well, there should be no dilemma. To witness torture and act the ostrich is a criminal offence, which explains why the Metropolitan police are currently investigating the actions of the security services in at least two cases. This is a failure in leadership, more than of the agents in the field.”
But it is not just a failure of leadership. Why haven’t the checks and balances within Parliament worked? Why is that we do not hear of ministers, civil servants, officers and others breaking ranks, denouncing both torture and complicity in torture, and resigning where appropriate?
Why has no one from the faith leaders come forward and remarked on Judeo-Christian values and their incompatibility with torture, or the complicity with torture?
Where are the voices from the captains of industry. Professor Darius Rejali, in his masterly study, ‘Torture and Democracy’ [Princeton University Press, 2007], amongst many examples, cites a British company that installed the ‘House of Fun’ at Dubai’s Special Branch Headquarters: “Marketed as ‘prisoner disorientation equipment’ it is a high-tech room fitted with a generator for white noise and strobe lights such as might be seen in a disco, but turned up to full volume capable of reducing the victim to submission within half an hour”.
After all the Conventions and Protocols to which Britian has signed up to are unambigious.
The UN Declaration against Torture states that “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.” The United Kingdom signed up to the UN Convention against Torture on 15th March 15, 1985.
The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 3, reads, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The United Kingdom signed up to the ECHR in July 2000.
Any collusion in torture, or support of torture, or sanctioning a policy that leads to people being tortured is a breach of conventions. The witnessing of torture without seeking to prevent is a breach of conventions This includes the outsourcing of torture. If British authorities have been complicit in the torture of people, whether outside the UK or within, then this is clearly a breach of the UN Convention and the ECHR.
British ministers and authorities take the moral high ground:
- Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a Downing Street Press briefing, February 2009: “Our policy is not to support torture or to condone torture”
- Lord Malloch-Brown, in a debate in the Lords on the case of Binyam Mohamed on 5th Feb 2009: “At the heart of Mr Mohamed’s case have been allegations that he was tortured by foreign government officials in a number of locations. It is of course the long-standing policy of the Government that we never condone, authorise or co-operate in torture. I repeat that commitment today.”
- Sir John Scarlett, outgoing head of MI6, stated in a BBC interview in August 2009, “there is no torture and no complicity in torture by the British secret service”.
This moral high ground does not square up with Mr Evans's Bristol speech.
Gareth Peirce, the famous human rights lawyer has noted in a brilliant essay in the London Review of Books, “Torture is the deliberate infliction of pain by a state on captive persons. It is prohibited and so is the use of its product. The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment emphasises that there are no exceptional circumstances at all justifying its use, whether state of war or threat of war or any other public emergency; none of these may be invoked as a justification. Orders from superiors are explicitly excluded as a defence, and moreover the Convention requires that wherever the torture occurred and whatever the nationality of the torturer or victim, parties must prosecute or extradite perpetrators to a country that is willing to prosecute them.” (LRB, 14th May 2009)
Can there be a shared value more important than the complete prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment?
http://blogs.salaam.co.uk/article.php?story=20091016172009346