Democratic accountability of the security and intelligence agencies is “woefully deficient” and an independent inquiry must be set up to investigate numerous and detailed allegations of their complicity in torture, a cross-party group of senior members of parliament (MPs) and peers was expected to say yesterday.
In a stinging report, prompted in large part by disclosures in the Guardian, they say that in view of the detailed allegations, ministers can no longer get away with repeating standard denials. They say the government must immediately publish instructions given to MI5 security service and MI6 secret service officers on the detention and interrogation of suspects abroad.
The report, by parliament’s joint committee on human rights, falls short of stating that the security and intelligence agencies were complicit in torture, thereby breaching British domestic and international law.
Andrew Dismore, the committee’s Labour chairman, said: “If the allegations are true, they amount to complicity. They have not been tested but given the scale and number simply to issue a blanket denial is not adequate. That is why we are calling for an independent inquiry.”
Among a list of actions that it says would amount to complicity in torture, and therefore in breach of the UK’s legal obligations, the report includes “the provision of questions to such a foreign intelligence service to be put to a detainee who has been, is being, or [is] likely to be tortured.”
It also includes “the systematic reception of information known or thought likely to have been obtained from detainees subjected to torture.”
“For the purposes of state responsibility for complicity in torture ... ‘complicity’ means simply one state giving assistance to another state in the commission of torture, or acquiescing in such torture, in the knowledge ... of the circumstances of the torture which is or has been taking place,” it says.
The Guardian passed to the panel the names of seven out of 11 British or dual nationals detained in Pakistan where British agencies, it says, colluded in, or knew about, their torture or mistreatment.
“Our experience over the past year is that ministers are determined to avoid parliamentary scrutiny and accountability on these matters, refusing requests to give oral evidence; providing a standard answer to some of our written questions, which fails to address the issues; and ignoring other questions entirely,” it said.
“Ministers should not be able to act in this way. The fact that they can do so confirms that the system for ministerial accountability for security and intelligence matters is woefully deficient,” it said.
The British government denied yesterday that it condones and engages in torture.
Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis said Britain did not have “anything to hide,” adding that Prime Minister Gordon Brown had pledged to publish guidance given to intelligence officers.
Britain does not “engage in, collude with or condone” torture, he told BBC radio.
However, “war on terror” allies did not always have the same standards as Britain, he said.
“We can’t possibly stop working with those countries in terms of our national interest or the security interests of British citizens,” he said.
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