US idea of torture 'not same as in UK', judge says
The US’s idea of what constitutes torture “is not the same as ours and doesn’t appear to coincide with that of most civilised countries”, a High Court judge in London said today.
Mr Justice Collins’s comment came during a hearing in which he was being asked to order UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to request the return to the UK of British residents held by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The judge said he had heard on the BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning that a UN report was recommending the Guantanamo detention facility should be closed because torture was still being carried on there.
In reply to the judge’s remark about the American definition of torture, Rabinder Singh QC, for three detainees, said the UK and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg would “undoubtedly condemn” many of the practices at Guantanamo Bay.
Mr Rabinder Singh was appearing for Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, and members of families living in the UK who have filed evidence of the distress they are suffering while their loved ones remain in detention.
Counsel said the case arose out of what had been described by a Law Lord as the "utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay", where people were being detained indefinitely without trial. The question was how the courts of Britain should respond to that lawlessness.
Nine British nationals who had been detained there have now been flown back to the UK and released without charge.
The three detainees in today’s case were long-term residents of the UK, although not British citizens.
Mr al-Rawi, 37, an Iraqi national who had lived in Britain since 1985, and his Jordanian business partner Mr al-Banna, who was granted refugee status in 2000, were detained three years ago in Gambia – “far from any theatre of war”, said Mr Rabinder Singh.
They were alleged to have been associated with al-Qaida through their connection with the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada.
But counsel said Mr al-Rawi’s contact with Qatada was “expressly approved and encouraged by British intelligence” to whom he supplied information about the cleric.
Intelligence operatives assured Mr al-Rawi that, should he run into trouble, they would intervene and assist him.
But the British government was unwilling to make material available to him when a hearing on his case was held at Guantanamo Bay.
Mr al-Banna was said to have been in possession of “a homemade electronic device” at the time of his arrest.
It was, in fact, a battery charger bought from Argos and cleared by the UK authorities before he went to Gambia.
Mr Deghayes was detained in Pakistan. His name was said to be on the FBI’s “most wanted” list, but the photograph in his file was of a “totally different individual”, said counsel.
Mr Deghayes had been rendered virtually blind in one eye by the use of pepper spray and the gouging of his eye during his detention, yet was still being constantly subjected to high light levels.
| Related Stories: |
|
