Archive for July, 2010

Back in February, a distressing Islamophobic fuse was lit when Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, criticized Amnesty for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, the organization of which he is the director, in the pages of the Sunday Times, via a journalist who is not known for balanced reporting on issues relating to Islam. Gita Sahgal eventually lost her job, but not until Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners had received death threats, and not until numerous Islamophobic commentators — many of whom were not known for their sympathies with feminism — had rallied to Ms. Sahgal’s cause.

In the months since, Amnesty, Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners appear to have weathered the storm, but Gita Sahgal’s mistaken — and often confused — assault on her former employers, and on Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, continues to live on, most recently in the United States. As a result, I was pleased to note that the journalist, author and playwright Victoria Brittain recently provided a comprehensive overview of the whole sorry saga for openDemocracy, which I’m cross-posting below.

Dangerous game: a reply to Gita Sahgal and her supporters
By Victoria Brittain, openDemocracy, June 30, 2010

In the week following June 26, International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the co-author with Moazzam Begg of his book Enemy Combatant: the terrifying true story of a Briton in Guantánamo, comes to the defence of his work and that of Cageprisoners. A bitter controversy has only fed Islamophobia, demonised an innocent person, and obscured the real human rights issues at stake.

Two weeks ago in Leeds, I gave a peace lecture honouring Olof Palme, which ranged over wars old and new, the bombing of Dresden, Daniel Ellsberg, Wikileaks, Bloody Sunday, and the Turkish flotilla to Gaza. Afterwards I was approached by two young Muslim women. They wanted to discuss the issues raised in the lecture, but also to talk about how isolated they felt and how hard it is for them these days to talk about politics without fearing hostility and feeling that they are being seen as “terrorists”. In the following two days I talked with another young Muslim woman whose husband is on a Control Order, and who in desperation had broken its conditions and faced possible dire consequences.  I also went to see a Muslim woman whose husband is in prison accused of terror-related activities, and one of whose sons is in trouble.

Three days, four Muslim women. The Leeds women came to my lecture because Moazzam Begg told them about it; the two London women I know because Moazzam Begg asked me to visit them some years back, to break their isolation; and he and I have visited the Control Order family together, with Home Office clearance.

Since he was released from Guantánamo, this has been his work — campaigning on behalf of those still held without trial or hope of justice, and doing what he can to help distraught wives and families.

At the centre of the bitter, feminist-led recent controversy over him and Amnesty International, is a completely false perception of his attitudes to women, based on the fact that he once worked in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Long-standing, complex and important debates on gender politics and religion have been shoe-horned into a simple demonisation of him.

None of the Muslim women I mention have ever heard of Gita Sahgal, former head of the gender department in Amnesty International, but their reality is undeniable. The Britain they live in is one of isolation and fear. Ms Sahgal’s recent disagreement with her employer, Amnesty International, and her decision to publicise her views on that in an interview with the Sunday Times, has fed into an existing virulent islamophobia. It should have remained an important internal argument inside Amnesty International. Ms Sahgal’s ill-considered words about Moazzam Begg and others at Cageprisoners have caused very serious damage to their reputation, and provoked death threats.

Like many people who work with Cageprisoners and Moazzam Begg, I wrongly assumed that the Amnesty row would have a brief media life in which old enemies of Amnesty on the right would take some pleasure, while the usual metropolitan journalists who resent the celebrity profile of a Muslim man from Birmingham who is both a good writer and public speaker, would follow Ms Sahgal’s lead, and recycle old criticisms of Moazzam Begg in the coded islamophobic terms which have become routine in the British media.

However, the “on-line global petition” signed by 2,145 people, Ms Sahgal’s statement carried prominently, and unusually, in the influential New York Review of Books, her subsequent call to action in the name of Amnesty’s founder Peter Benenson, show that — whether or not she intended it — she has turned into a celebrity herself. Following her time heading the section of Amnesty International devoted to women’s issues, and previous work with Women Against Fundamentalism, her attack on Amnesty and on Moazzam Begg may prove a career maker. (The Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali has prospered as a celebrity for her critique of conservative Islam, earning a job at the conservative US think tank the American Enterprise Institute).

In her NYRB statement Ms Sahgal sets out her stall:

“I am now free to offer my help as an external expert with an intimate knowledge of Amnesty International’s processes and policies. I can explain in public debates … that adherence to violent jihad … is an integral part of a political philosophy that promotes the destruction of human rights generally and contravenes Amnesty International’s specific policies relating to systematic violence, particularly against women …”

At the centre of Ms Sahgal’s criticism of Amnesty for working with Moazzam Begg — who can speak on rendition, torture and imprisonment from personal experience — and Cageprisoners, the web-based organisation which campaigns for Muslim prisoners held without trial, are three charges against him:

• Attitudes to women
• Support for the Taliban
• Support for “violent jihad”

These have morphed into a generalised and theoretical attack on Amnesty for rejecting a “belief in universalism”, and a call for Amnesty to restore the integrity of human rights, as Ms Sahgal puts it. Or, as the petition puts it, “We believe that Gita Sahgal has raised a fundamental point of principle which is about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination”. (This is in tune with the astounding new US Supreme Court 6-3 ruling that prevents humanitarian groups from speaking to groups considered by the US to be terrorists, even for legal advice or peace-making.) In reality it would be an awkward stretch to imagine how Cageprisoners could be considered committed to systematic discrimination, but in the vagueness of these repeated slurs, too many people have fallen for that extremely damaging idea. Moazzam Begg’s calm, modest and dignified response to Ms Sahgal can be read on the Cageprisoners website.

Ms Sahgal first met Moazzam Begg in 2006, when she was introduced as from, not Amnesty, but the feminist group Southall Black Sisters, in a BBC Radio 4 Hecklers programme. She made a presentation alleging the government was pandering to fundamentalism in the war on terror, by engaging with groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain. She was criticised strongly by a panel which included Lord Ahmed, Professor Tariq Ramadan, Daud Abdullah of the MCB, and Moazzam Begg. At the end of the programme, one of them went up to her and said he hoped she was alright and had not found the discussion an ordeal — it was Moazzam Begg.

In the years since then, Moazzam Begg opened himself to debate and argument with people of every persuasion. He has addressed hundreds of meetings in the UK [You can see Begg speaking at the session on torture at the Convention on Modern Liberty, here], many of them organized by Cageprisoners, or by Amnesty UK, or Amnesty local branches, lawyers groups, and indeed any group in Britain and beyond, on the human rights issues around Guantánamo Bay, and Muslims in Britain detained on secret evidence without trial. (He came to London to speak at the Southbank for my play, Waiting, which was entirely about women affected by the war on terror). There have also been dozens of delegations to Downing Street on behalf of prisoners and their families. Much of his focus has been on the attempt to get back to Britain from Guantánamo his friend Shaker Aamer, a British resident with Saudi nationality and a British wife and four children. Moazzam Begg has concentrated, among other things, on averting the threat to send Shaker to Saudi Arabia if he is released, because it would devastate his wife as she would be unlikely to be able to join him, given the Saudis’ authoritarian rules on marrying non-Saudis.

In many of these meetings the wives and families of the detained men have been present, their letters read aloud, their daughters speaking for their fathers. Among the women who have supported some of these events have been Gareth Peirce, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Kennedy, Caroline Lucas, Sarah Teather, Kate Hudson, Bianca Jagger, Kate Allen of Amnesty UK, Helen Bamber, and myself. Is it likely, if Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners had the attitudes to women attributed to them by Ms Sahgal and her on-line petitioners, they would want to work with women like us, over and over again? Or would we want to work with them?

The current work is, or should be, the central issue, but it has got obscured by a torrent of words. The recent post on openDemocracy from Rahila Gupta makes parallels between the Amnesty/ Cageprisoners issue, and the unwitting support of Oxfam and other UK-based NGOs for various controversial groups, including a women’s group in India whose leader appears to be a member of the BJP. Rahila Gupta writes, “like Begg and Cageprisoners, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is chameleon-like when it comes to pinning down its true colours”, and then throws in about Moazzam Begg, “his self-proclaimed Salifism — a highly sectarian strand of Islam which has much in common with Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.”

Ms Gupta is a very experienced journalist and writer, who knows the BJP well enough to judge it. (She is also the editor of a book on Southall Black Sisters). But her chameleon slur on Moazzam Begg is simply wrong. It could only be said by someone who does not know the person concerned. I worked day in, day out, (weekends excluded) with Mr Begg for eight long months in 2005 to help write his book. And in the following five years I have seen him dozens of times, in circumstances as different as visiting his wife and children, or with families in desperate trouble, or in public meetings. It is not likely that I would have failed to pick up on chameleon behavior and attitudes.

As for his so-called self-proclaimed Salafism, this is also a puzzle, and a red herring, drawing most readers into an intellectual area that they are unfamiliar with, and uneasy, and where Ms Gupta is no expert. It is a journalist’s attempt at easy compartmentalisation, and convenient shorthand for “extremist”. But Salafis come in all shapes and sizes and a range of beliefs and practices — as do Protestants.

Extremism is the message too, when the NYRB statement talks of “areas where jihad supported by Begg’s associates is being waged”. Which areas is Ms Sahgal talking about, and who does she mean? Afghanistan, perhaps, where his associate in torture in the US prisons of Bagram and Guantánamo, Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, is under house arrest from which he has written an historical book, now translated into English, which has had him treated to a respectful 30 minute interview on the BBC? We don’t know.

And yet another damaging phrase is there to stigmatise, and stick in people’s minds: “the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim.” Violent jihad is a tautology, like violent war. No one in Cageprisoners calls for killing of civilians, though they might consider the anti-apartheid movement, or the anti-colonial struggles of the Algerians, Vietnamese and South Africans in the 1960s and 70s to have been a secular kind of defensive jihad.

Again, look at the work, and listen to what is said at Cageprisoners’ meetings. They are often chaired by a non-muslim, by a female, addressed by non-muslims, and in a whole series last year, featured former Guantánamo guards, who know better than the petition signatories what took place and why. The meetings’ message is always the same — work for justice for people being denied it.

Ms Gupta writes that Ms Sahgal’s attempts to “expose” the dangers of providing a platform for religious and communalist forces have been hijacked by right wing, illiberal voices using the opportunity to attack Amnesty. In fact Ms Sahgal must have been aware, with her choice of paper for one thing, that she was giving ammunition to just the very rightwing illiberal forces Ms Gupta mentions. There was no hijacking of her campaign. Nor did she “expose” anything — the use of Moazzam Begg at Amnesty functions was entirely public, and gave them useful credibility in an area — the war on terror — in which the organization was considered weak by many of those closely concerned.

The demonising has had a nasty personal tone. Ms Sahgal has stated that she feels unsafe in the company of Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners’ senior researcher, Asim Qureshi. (This is curious, as she made the statement while sitting next to Mr Qureshi in a BBC studio. And, on her second meeting with Moazzam Begg, at a Cageprisoners press conference in The Frontline Club in the aftermath of leaving Amnesty, she asked him to sit down with her afterwards and they had a long conversation. Face to face, incidentally, she was quite unable to clarify what her real difference with him is).

In print she has gone so far as to pen, in the NYRB, the very offensive sentence, “But the spectre that arises through the continued promotion of Moazzam Begg as the perfect victim is that Amnesty International is operating its own policies of sanitizing the truth.”

Neither Moazzam Begg nor any of the British citizens or residents who returned from Bagram and Guantánamo are victims, so much as survivors of the war on terror which has destroyed the lives of so many others unjustly held and tortured in those and other US prisons. After years of being held beyond the reach of the law, being tortured, being betrayed by Britain, all without a single charge brought against them, they have against extraordinary odds rebuilt their lives with families, education, jobs, in a climate in Britain that was not easy when they returned, and has got worse, partly thanks to Ms Sahgal’s initiative. Respect would be the appropriate response to these men, particularly from someone with a background in the human rights industry and no excuse for not knowing the details of what was done to them.

The death threats to Cageprisoners that followed Ms Sahgal’s irresponsible words cannot just be shrugged off. For Moazzam Begg in particular — as young British soldiers die in Afghanistan — it cannot be easy to feel safe walking in public after being branded the greatest supporter of the Taliban. He can’t ask everyone he sees to read his book and see what his real position has been. The fact that he actually went, in a joint decision with his wife, with his young family to Afghanistan, to build schools for girls, and dig wells, at least should be a matter of public record by now. The objective was to engage, however difficult it was, in the experiment of an Islamic state, which he by no means accepted blindly — as his book makes clear. That same willingness to engage has been behind his accepting the responsibility of playing a leading part in the debates on the war on terror and its fallout. He could hardly have foretold this ‘gender politics’ chapter of the consequences.

But even more serious is how Ms Sahgal has contributed to the current climate of intolerance and islamophobia in Britain, where the families of Muslim women like those I mentioned at the start are having their hopes and dreams of a normal life in Britain dashed. Intolerance and confrontation with Muslims is on the rise all over Europe. Parliaments in France, Belgium and Spain are currently trying to pass laws against wearing the full veil in public, and a French MP justifies it by talking of combating “the French Taliban in our midst.” Violent incidents are recorded in Britain’s local papers every week. Human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy QC said on a platform recently that we should be concerned that hostile and vicious expressions towards Islam have become shockingly respectable in our society — as racism and anti-Semitism once were.

Ms Sahgal has been playing a dangerous game, and has got a following — besides the obvious one she would get on the right — that she does not deserve.  This row will not destroy Amnesty, nor Cageprisoners, but it has given a push towards further heated polarization, when what we need are cool heads in complex debates on the politics of gender, patriarchy, and of religion, now when religious fundamentalism is on the rise all over the world — including the US.

The only good outcome from this whole unnecessary saga would be a new focus on what those petition signers, so keen to support human rights, can do about the on-going excesses of the war on terror. For a start, they could work to shame the British and American governments into ending the nine year ordeal of a woman like Shaker Aamer’s wife, who has now been deprived of her husband for longer than she was with him. Up to now, her main support, besides her lawyers, has been Cageprisoners.

Victoria Brittain is a journalist and writer. She has spent much of her working life in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, writing for The Guardian and various French magazines. She has been a consultant to the UN on The Impact of Conflict on Women, is on the Council of the Institute of Race Relations, the Board of Widows Rights International, and is a Patron of Palestine Solidarity.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the United States — the post-World War II driver of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions, prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment — went off the rails and introduced a horrendous global program of rendition, torture, arbitrary detention and prisons beyond the law, other countries who were drawn into the “War on Terror” have striven to keep their own involvement quiet, and for good reason. Although the Bush administration was drunk on unfettered executive power, and was largely encouraged and supported by members of Congress, elsewhere these supposedly “robust” responses to terrorism were conducted with far more subterfuge, as the governments in question recognized that they were crimes, and, at worst, crimes against humanity.

Despite the ostrich-like maneuvering of America’s allies, several significant watchdogs refused to let these crimes remain hidden. In Europe, for example, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, led an investigation into secret detention and rendition involving Council of Europe member states, and published two damning reports in June 2006 and June 2007, in which he concluded that there was “now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA [existed] in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania,” and that “All the members and partners of NATO signed up to the same permissive — not to say illegal — terms that allowed CIA operations to permeate throughout the European continent and beyond.”

In February this year, the UN published a report, the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” which was prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances. The report concluded that at least 40 countries, including the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and Italy, were “complicit in the secret detention” of prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

Exposing British complicity in torture in the UK courts

In the UK, questions about the security services’ complicity in torture hit the courts in the summer of 2008, in relation to Binyam Mohamed, a British resident seized in Pakistan in April 2002 and subsequently rendered to Morocco by the CIA, where, as he told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, he was tortured for 18 months, before being rendered to the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, a secret CIA prison, and the US prison at Bagram airbase. He arrived in Guantánamo in September 2004.

In the summer of 2008, triggered by the British government’s refusal to release 42 documents in its possession relating to Mohamed’s treatment in Pakistan by US agents, his lawyers secured a judicial review, in which the judges — Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones — concluded that the British government had become involved in “wrongdoing” committed by the United States. The judges explained that Mohamed’s detention in Pakistan from April to July 2002, when a British agent visited him, was “unlawful” under Pakistani law, because he “was being detained by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer.” They were also highly critical of the fact that the British intelligence services “provided further information to the United States and further questions to be asked of BM [Mohamed]” for nine months after the visit in May 2002, even though he “was still incommunicado and they must also have appreciated that he was not in a United States facility and that the facility in which he was being detained was that of a foreign government (other than Afghanistan).”

The judges ordered the government to allow Mohamed’s lawyers to have access to the 42 documents, but their attempts to publish their own summary of the documents, describing what US agents did to Mohamed in Pakistan, was blocked by the foreign secretary David Miliband, who argued that publication of the summary would threaten the intelligence sharing relationship between the US and the UK.

This impasse, which involved several more hearings over an 18-month period, was only finally broken in February this year, when the Court of Appeal ordered the government to release the summary, revealing that Mohamed had been subjected to a program of carefully monitored sleep deprivation that resembled aspects of the torture program being developed at that time for use on the alleged “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah, who was seized in Pakistan 12 days before Mohamed.

In the meantime, the Metropolitan Police began investigating claims that the security services had been complicit in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, and although Mohamed was released from Guantánamo in February 2009, the pressure on the government continued when seven former Guantánamo prisoners (including Mohamed) launched a civil claim for damages, suing MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Attorney General on the basis that agents of the security services were involved in unlawful acts and conspiracy, and that they were involved in, or failed to stop, their detention and ill-treatment (and in some cases, their “extraordinary rendition” to secret prisons).

By December, the ongoing litigation also included Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held in Guantánamo, whose lawyers sought the release of documents demonstrating that British agents were present in the room when he was subjected to torture in US custody in Kandahar, Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo. In February this year, the Metropolitan Police announced that their investigation into the alleged complicity of the security services in torture had been expanded to include Shaker Aamer, and that they were also investigating a third case involving MI6 and another possible torture victim, who was not identified.

More British complicity in torture exposed: in Pakistan and six other countries

While all these cases involved cooperation with the United States, other troubling revelations indicated that the British government was unilaterally involved in dubious practices involving torture in other countries. From April 2008 onwards, Ian Cobain of the Guardian has steadily exposed a number of cases involving the torture of British citizens — primarily in Pakistan, but also in Bangladesh, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — which have demonstrated British involvement in torture abroad, and have involved specific requests for particular men to be seized, questions to be asked during interrogations, and, on occasion, the presence of British agents in person (although never during actual torture sessions). A detailed article summarizing Cobain’s findings was published in the Guardian in July 2009 (although there have been other developments since), and a Human Rights Watch report, “Cruel Britannia,” was published in November. In addition, in April 2009, Cageprisoners published “Fabricating Terrorism II” (PDF), which added Jordan, Kenya and Syria to the list of countries in which the British security services had been involved in the detention and dubious interrogation of suspects.

In response to the steady leak of damaging information, the Conservative MP David Davis forcefully exposed British complicity in torture in the House of Commons last July, drawing attention to the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen seized in Pakistan with British help, and then subjected to torture, which including having his fingernails ripped out. Ahmed was then returned to the UK, where he was convicted of terrorist offences in a trial in which all mention of his torture was prohibited (although he has just been given leave to appeal). Compared to this intervention, the steady complaints of shadow foreign secretary William Hague were less spectacular, but he repeatedly called for an investigation, and on May 20 this year, less than three weeks after the General Election, he followed up on his complaints, announcing that there would be a judge-led inquiry into British complicity in torture.

On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that David Cameron and William Hague were “understood to have agreed the terms of a judge-led inquiry,” that it is “likely to be held in private,” and that it is “expected to offer compensation” in some cases. Quite how the inquiry will proceed has yet to be established. The Guardian noted that, after Hague’s initial announcement, “his remarks appeared to unsettle the intelligence services and required further discussion” in the PM’s new National Security Council. The Guardian also added, worryingly:

There were reports at the weekend, sourced to the Foreign Office, suggesting that the inquiry would examine only one case — that of Binyam Mohamed — and that Cameron had already concluded that the country’s intelligence agencies were guilty only of errors of omission, not commission.

New report by Human Rights Watch

While the debate continues over the scope of the coalition government’s inquiry, Human Rights Watch issued a new report, “‘No Questions Asked’: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture,” defining the key elements in questions of complicity in torture as they relate not only to the activities of the British government, but also to Germany and France, and stating, unambiguously:

France, Germany and the United Kingdom — pillars of the European Union and important allies in the fight against terrorism — demonstrate, through policy statements and practice, a willingness (even eagerness) to cooperate with foreign intelligence services in countries like Uzbekistan and Pakistan — notorious for abusive practices, both in general and against terrorism suspects in particular. They then use foreign torture information for intelligence and policing purposes … and, in some cases … [i]nformation tainted by torture abroad can end up as part of legal proceedings.

The report reveals how the absolute ban on torture — enshrined in the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment (in force since 1987) — has been, and continues to be circumvented in all three countries, primarily through a “No Questions Asked” policy regarding how the information was extracted.

At the core of these deliberately careful approaches to the use of information derived from torture is the question of what constitutes complicity in torture, and the report’s authors cite two influential sources to demonstrate that the governments involved have crossed a line. Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism, has stated that:

[R]eliance on information from torture in another country, even if the information is obtained only for operational purposes, inevitably implies the “recognition of lawfulness” of such practices and therefore triggers the application of principles of State responsibility. Hence, States that receive information obtained through torture or inhuman and degrading treatment are complicit in the commission of internationally wrongful acts. Such involvement is also irreconcilable with the obligation erga omnes of States to cooperate in the eradication of torture (PDF, para. 55).

In addition, during an examination of the definition of complicity in torture abroad (para. 42), the UK Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee (JCHR) decided that:

Systematic, regular receipt of information obtained under torture is … capable of amounting to “aid or assistance” in maintaining the situation created by other States’ serious breaches of the peremptory norm prohibiting torture … [T]he practice creates a market for the information produced by torture. As such, it encourages States which systematically torture to continue to do so.

The JCHR concluded that a “general practice of passively receiving intelligence information which has or may have been obtained under torture” is likely to give rise to state responsibility for complicity in torture.

The countries involved deny these claims, of course. The UK, which, like Germany and France, is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, and, in December 2003, was one of the first countries to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which “creates an international system to monitor places of detention worldwide, and a parallel domestic monitoring system in each country that ratifies it,” has been “engaged in an active campaign to encourage worldwide ratification and implementation” of the Optional protocol, but, at the same time, has “pursued a series of counter-terrorism policies that undermine the absolute prohibition on torture and ill-treatment.”

The problem with Memoranda of Understanding

Human Rights Watch opened its criticism of the British government by focusing on a policy relating to domestic terror suspects since the 9/11 attacks. The men in question — around a dozen, initially, from countries including Algeria and Jordan — were seized in the months following the attacks, and held without charge or trial in Belmarsh maximum-security prison until the Law Lords ruled, in December 2004, that such imprisonment — resembling the arbitrary detention in Guantánamo — was illegal. They were then released under strict bail conditions, akin to house arrest, and in recent years, as Cageprisoners explained in depth in a report entitled, “Detention Immorality” (PDF), they and dozens of other men — including British nationals — have been imprisoned again, pending deportation, or held under house arrest on control orders or deportation bail.

However, while the US government set up Guantánamo as an illegal interrogation camp, the British government had no interest in interrogating any of these men, who have never been questioned at all, and was, instead, determined to deport them to their home countries, circumventing the UN Convention Against Torture’s prohibition on returning foreign nationals to countries where there are “substantial grounds for believing that [they] would be in danger of being subjected to torture,” through Memoranda of Understanding.

These are agreements between the British government and the men’s home governments, in which such unlikely figures as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s dictator, claimed that they would treat the men humanely if they were returned. The project has not been entirely successful, as judges intervened to prevent any Libyans from being returned, having concluded that the MoU was untrustworthy, and attempts to deport men to Jordan and to Algeria (which has not even deigned to sign an official MoU), although approved by the Law Lords in February 2009, are currently on appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

In its criticism of the UK government’s attempts to rely on MoUs instead of prosecuting terror suspects in the UK, Human Rights Watch concluded that the government “has attempted to change European human rights jurisprudence banning returns to the risk of torture and ill-treatment by introducing a balancing test between the alleged threat to national security posed by an individual and the risk of ill-treatment upon return.”

Hidden guidelines and mistaken beliefs

In a further demonstration of its disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture, the British government has cooperated closely with the governments of countries that are regularly implicated in torture practices — primarily Pakistan, but also others, as outlined above. The report explains how the government “staunchly defends the use of information that may have been obtained through torture,” and “has argued for the right to use torture evidence in legal proceedings,” and has thereby “championed a minimalist, and ultimately mistaken interpretation of the Convention against Torture.” The report also notes that, in its most recent review of the UK, the UN Committee Against Torture criticized the government (para. 4(b)) for its “limited acceptance of the applicability of the Convention to the actions of its forces abroad.”

In seeking to understand the extent of British involvement in torture abroad, campaigners are stymied by the government’s refusal to release the guidelines issued to the security services. In June 2009, the Guardian reported that, in January 2002, MI5 and MI6 officers in Afghanistan were told they could not be “party” to torture and must not “be seen to condone it,” but that because prisoners were “not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”

Following the Abu Ghraib scandal in April 2004, the guidelines were rewritten, but although Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated in March 2009 that these guidelines would be released, he left office without doing so. In a sign that the new government may be less open than it has suggested, attempts by Reprieve to launch a judicial review of the guidelines were quashed on Tuesday after the government stepped in at the last minute with a claim that new guidelines would be published “very shortly,” just after Mr. Justice Collins had stated that, if the allegations about how British agents interrogated prisoners held overseas were true, they “indicated that there may well have been complicity in acts of torture.”

Despite this, what is known all too clearly is that the British government has stated openly that it has no problem accepting information derived from torture in an operational sense, even though such information is inherently unreliable (and its use contributes to a tolerance, if not an encouragement, of the use of torture by other countries). The report cites a strategy document, “CONTEST II,” which explicitly states that foreign intelligence services, “rarely volunteer the circumstances” in which prisoners are held, but even “[i]f it is established that material has been obtained from a detainee by torture,” it “may still be used to investigate and to stop terrorist attacks,” although it “would not be admissible in criminal or civil legal proceedings in the UK.”

Moreover, as I explained in an article last April, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) essentially reprised this argument in its 2008 annual report on human rights, issued in March 2009 (PDF, p. 15). After stating, “The use of intelligence possibly derived through torture presents a very real dilemma, given our unreserved condemnation of torture and our efforts to eradicate it,” the report’s authors concluded, “Where there is intelligence that bears on threats to life, we cannot reject it out of hand.”

In its 2009 human rights report, issued in March this year (PDF, p. 48), the FCO maintains its dangerously conflicted approach. After stating that “we must work with intelligence and security services overseas,” the report adds, “Some of them share our standards and laws while others do not. But we cannot afford the luxury of only dealing with those that do. The intelligence we get from others saves British lives.” The FCO also moves from a defense of the passive acceptance of torture-derived information to one in which it attempts to defend its cooperation with the torture regimes of Pakistan and elsewhere:

Whether sharing information [with foreign intelligence and security agencies], which might lead to the detention of people who could pose a threat to our national security, passing questions to be put to detainees, or participating in interviews of them, we do all we can to minimize, and where possible, avoid the risk that the people in question are mistreated by those holding them. However, there are times when we cannot reduce the risk to zero … Ultimately it is for Ministers to balance the risk of mistreatment against the national security needs and make a judgment.

This prompted Human Rights Watch to state that “[t]he complicity of UK agents in individual cases of abuse sends a damaging message to Pakistan that torture is acceptable in the context of interrogating terrorism suspects,” adding that, without attempts to “make genuine enquiries about the circumstances in which detainees are interrogated,” it also “sends a clear message to the authorities in Pakistan that the UK is indifferent about the torture of terrorism suspects in its custody.”

The Law Lords on thin ice

In seeking to justify its passive receipt — and its active solicitation — of torture-derived information, and its assertion that such material may be used operationally, the government appears to have taken comfort from the Law Lords, in a ruling in 2005 (A and Others vs. Secretary of State for the Home Department), in which Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, representing the majority view, claimed, “It is one thing for tainted information to be used by the executive when making operational decisions or by the police when exercising their investigatory powers, including powers of arrest,” but maintained that it was not appropriate for such information to be used in judicial proceedings, stating that, in a courtroom, “repugnance to torture demands that proof of facts should be found in more acceptable sources than information extracted by torture.”

The problem with the ruling — beyond the Lords’ inability to realize that they had failed to ensure that the use of torture is prevented at all times — lay with the notion that “the passive receipt and use of intelligence from countries with poor records on torture” is in any way acceptable. Human Rights Watch noted that both the JCHR and the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee disagreed. The committees focused in particular on claims made by Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who has stated (para. 14) that, when he informed his superiors that “the UK routinely and knowingly accepted information obtained under torture by Uzbek security services,” the chief legal advisor in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office “assured him that the Convention against Torture did not prohibit the receipt of information obtained under torture.”

The JCHR found that the “systematic receipt” of information derived, or probably derived from torture was “tantamount to complicity in torture and creates a market for torture,” and the FAC stated (PDF) that the use of “evidence which may have been obtained under torture on a regular basis, especially where it is not clear that protestations about mistreatment have elicited any change in behaviour by foreign intelligence services, could be construed as complicity in such behaviour.” Human Rights Watch agreed, stating that “uncritical use of such material breaches the UK’s duty to take positive steps to prevent torture wherever and by whomever committed,” and that it “may amount to complicity in torture.”

Moreover, Human Rights Watch explained that, although the ruling in A and Others was supposed to have “definitively affirmed the prohibition on the use of torture evidence in British judicial proceedings,” overturning a shocking ruling in the Court of Appeal in 2004, in which judges ruled that torture evidence could be used provided that the UK had “neither procured nor connived at” the torture, in reality it is all but impossible for torture-derived information to be challenged.

The majority of the Lords in A and Others thought they had compelled the government to exclude evidence when it is established “by means of such diligent inquiries into the sources that it is practicable to carry out and on a balance of probabilities” that it was obtained under torture, but as Human Rights Watch noted, it succeeded only in shifting the burden of proof onto the accused, setting “what may be an impossible standard to meet given the difficulties in ascertaining the precise circumstances in which intelligence information was obtained.”

Moreover, in the court where this material is used — SIAC, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission — matters relating to the proposed deportation of foreign terror suspects are conducted in closed sessions, with the accused represented by special advocates who are prohibited from discussing anything with their clients. This ludicrous and unjust situation prompted Lord Bingham, in a dissenting opinion, to note, “it is inconsistent with the most rudimentary notions of fairness to blindfold a man and then impose a standard which only the sighted could hope to meet.”

In the second part of this article, I will focus on Human Rights Watch’s analysis of how both Germany and France employ their own devious methods to use information derived through the use of torture. These are generally less well-known than the British story, but no less disturbing. As for the UK, Human Rights Watch recommends that the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which examines the budget, administration and policy of the security services, needs replacing with a body that has genuine power, because, at present, “the security services and the responsible ministers (the Foreign Secretary in the case of MI6 and Home Secretary in the case of MI5) can refuse to provide to the ISC sensitive information … and information supplied by another government if that government does not consent.”

Human Rights Watch therefore concludes that what is required is “an independent, public judicial inquiry into all cases in which there are allegations of British government complicity, participation or knowledge of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees.” This is certainly what is required, and we can only hope that David Cameron was not letting a particularly cynical cat out of the bag by concluding, before an inquiry has even started, that the intelligence agencies “were guilty only of errors of omission, not commission.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, The Smirking Chimp, United Progressives and The Public Record.

For an archive of articles about Binyam Mohamed, see here, and for an archive of articles about Britain’s anti-terror laws, see here.

Last week, Amnesty International in Slovakia revealed that three men released from Guantánamo to Slovakia in January had embarked on a hunger strike to protest about the conditions in which they are being held. Pending relocation, the men have been held since their arrival in a detention center in Medved’ov, in the south west of Slovakia, and the spokesman for the three, Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar, a former Egyptian army officer, “described their living conditions as poor — having only beds and a sink at their disposal and being allowed to leave their rooms for only an hour per day.” In addition, he explained that they “are not allowed contact with anyone except for personnel in the facility and their lawyer.”

The Slovak authorities denied El-Gazzar’s claims, but on Saturday Tomas Vasilko, a Slovakian journalist, told me that he had spoken to El-Gazzar by phone, and provided a further explanation of why he and the other men are so frustrated. “He was really upset about the conditions they live in here,” Vasilko explained, adding, “He told me that firstly, in Guantánamo, the Slovak delegation didn’t mention the word detention — they told them that they would be free with some restrictions. When they arrived in Slovakia they told them they had to stay in a detention facility for asylum seekers for six months, but after that they would get a house in a town with a Muslim community. But one month ago they told the men that plan had changed and they would go to another detention facility for another six months. He was really frustrated and that’s the reason why they started the hunger strike.”

In an article published in the Slovak newspaper SME (mentioned and quoted from in an English language article in the Slovak Spectator), Tomas Vasilko added that, in his phone conversation with El-Gazzar, the Egyptian had reiterated his complaints, and had also described the conditions in which he and the other two former Guantánamo prisoners were living as “a 100-percent prison.” “Even in Guantánamo it was better,” El-Gazzar told Vasilko. “We could communicate with everyone, here we cannot.” He added, “Now, I think the best way would be to leave Slovakia. We want our freedom, we are not criminals, and we are not here illegally.”

Via Tomas Vasilko’s article, the Slovak Spectator also explained more about the plans to move the men to another detention camp, which had caused them such anguish. El-Gazzar stated that they were told they would stay in the detention center in Medved’ov for six months, but had recently been informed that they “are to be transferred to Zvolen where they will spend another six months in a facility for asylum seekers.”

El-Gazzar also pointed out that the conditions in which they are being held are noticeably worse than in other countries in which former prisoners have been released. As the Slovak Spectator described it, he “said they are in contact with other Guantánamo detainees who were transferred to other countries such as Hungary, who have said they are free to move about and have received proper accommodation and financial support.”

In my communication with Tomas Vasilko, he asked me about these claims, and a version of the following interview appeared in his article at the weekend:

Tomas Vasilko: What do you think about the conditions in which the men are currently held?

Andy Worthington: Former prisoners need support and care, especially if, as with the men in Slovakia, they’re alone in a new and unknown country. I have to say that from the moment I heard that they were being held in a detention center, I didn’t think that it sounded like the most supportive kind of environment, and I very much hope that, with the spotlight on the Slovak government following the announcement of the hunger strike, senior officials will move swiftly to rehouse the men in more appropriate conditions.

Tomas Vasilko: They say the restrictions at Medved’ov are worse than in Cuba.

Andy Worthington: Given what Adel said about expecting to be rehoused, I can understand how this would be very upsetting. I think five months is more than enough time for the government to find them better accommodation, and would suggest that the impression given by this long delay is that the government doesn’t care much about the needs of these men. I’m not saying that’s the case; just that it’s the impression given.

Tomas Vasilko: Adel El-Gazzar says that in other countries the men were free from the beginning, and have been provided with housing. Can you confirm this?

Andy Worthington: It is certainly true that in Belgium, France, Ireland, Portugal and Switzerland (and Bermuda and Palau), the men have been given houses immediately and help with integrating into society. I believe this is the case in Bulgaria, Georgia and Hungary as well, and in Spain, a Palestinian who arrived in February is currently in a hotel, awaiting the availability of a house. Only in Albania, from what I understand, are the men in some kind of refugee center.

Tomas Vasilko: El-Gazzar also says that the United States provides money to look after the men — apparently up to 1,000 Euros per person. Do you have any information about this?

Andy Worthington: I don’t know about the men being given money personally, as I haven’t heard about that, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. As for the figure of 1000 Euros a month from the US for looking after them, that seems plausible, although this is money that would be given to the government to provide accommodation and support for them — and if this is what has happened in Slovakia, of course, then the government so far appears to have done very little to justify the provision of those funds.

In an update yesterday, Tomas Vasilko addressed another of the men’s complaints — and the only one conceded by government officials. On Friday, I explained that a representative of Amnesty International Slovensko had told the dpa news agency that the men not only “felt isolated and badly looked after,” but were also concerned because, after five months, their legal status “was still not clear.” I also explained that Bernard Priecel, the chief officer at the Interior Ministry’s Migration Bureau, conceded that “the lack of clarity on their legal status could be a burden for them,” and quoted the dpa news agency as stating, “At the moment they [are] simply foreigners, without asylum seeker status,” even though, when they arrived in Slovakia in January, Interior Minister Robert Kalinak had “promised that their residence permit status would be cleared up quickly.”

Yesterday, Tomas Vasilko informed me that the men have just met with the Slovak chief of UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), who explained that the men had asked for asylum two months ago. According to Slovak law, this means that they are supposed to receive an answer within 90 days, so that the government has one more month to respond.

This is progress of a sort, but it still remains apparent, as it did last week, that whether through individual inertia on the part of the Slovak government, through a failure on the part of the EU, or through a failure on the part of the US government, which bears the primary responsibility for securing the men’s welfare, something is not entirely right when, five months after arriving in Slovakia from Guantánamo, Adel El-Gazzar and his two companions have had to resort to extreme measures to try to sort out their status in their new home country, even though this is something that should surely have taken place before their arrival.

Note: For an update on this story, including accounts of the two men living with Adel El-Gazzar (Poolad Tsiradzho, an Azerbaijani, and Rafiq al-Hami, a Tunisian), see: Who Are the Three Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners on Hunger Strike in Slovakia?

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on Eurasia Review and The Public Record.