Pretendy Liberal

British Government seeks to ban release of torture evidence in Binyam Mohamed case

2011-10-19T17:48:00.001+01:00

Reposted without apology:

http://www.reprieve.org.uk/press/2011_10_19_Government_seeks_to_ban_evidence/

British Government seeks to ban legal principle which led to release of torture evidence in Binyam Mohamed case

Today the Coalition Government published a Green Paperproposing major reforms to how government and intelligence agents supply evidence to British courts. The proposals are highly dangerous in terms of how they affect the British legal system and the position of victims of torture and abuse.

The reforms are a response to the Binyam Mohamed case and others like it, in which the security services fought hard to suppress evidence of torture. Despite being strongly critical of British complicity in torture while in opposition, the current Government is now seeking to close down the very legal technique through which the scandal became public.

By banning the use of Norwich Pharmacal, a legal principle which forces the disclosure of evidence that the government is 'mixed up' in wrongdoing such as torture, and simultaneously imposing a closed court system for tort claims, the Government is cutting off the mechanism by which torture complicity may be revealed.

Had the proposed ban been in place ten years ago, the evidence of torture that freed Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo Bay would never have been revealed, either to Binyam's lawyers or to the British public. Statements tortured out of Binyam would therefore have been treated as legitimate evidence and he would likely still be imprisoned in Guantanamo, the victim of both torture and a government cover-up. There likely would have been no Gibson Inquiry into torture complicity.

Reprieve's Executive Director Clare Algar said: "The Government is seeking to close off the very methods by which we first found out about UK complicity in torture and rendition. Were the measures proposed today in place at the time of the Binyam Mohamed case, the British public would never have known about the appalling abuses our own officials had been involved in. Even the Government's own Gibson Inquiry would never have been set up. This Government came to power claiming it wanted to get to the bottom of Britain's involvement in torture. Instead, they are merely seeking to ensure that in future, whatever dirty secrets are swept under the carpet stay there."

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. For further information, please contact Donald Campbell or Katherine O'Shea at Reprieve's press office: +44 (0) 207 427 1082. For more on the Binyam Mohamed case

2. The Green Paper arises out of the strenuous objections made by the Americans when – at the prompting of the media -- the High Court revealed evidence that American agents had tortured Binyam Mohamed. The US complained that the so-called "Third Party Rule" interposes an absolute bar to revealing security information provided by one country to another, absent explicit agreement from the first country.

Although the government will seek to divert attention from this focus, a key element of the Green Paper will therefore be on appeasing our US allies. The Green Paper is expected to propose codification of a variation of a "rule" that has actually only been an informal intelligence sharing arrangement. Under this rule, the Court would be barred from ever revealing the source of material obtained from a foreign intelligence source unless the other country has consented to its publication. This would prevent any repetition of the Binyam Mohamed disclosures, where the media successfully pressed for release of a very limited seven paragraph edition of US intelligence reports corroborating the British resident's torture in American custody.

3. The Norwich Pharmacal principle is important because it allows courts to seek disclosure from parties who were not the torturers, but were 'mixed up' in the torture, ie complicit. The Government wants to ban the use of this principle in cases involving secret material. This will include cases of torture complicity.

First, such a ban will override the UK's legal obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), which requires courts to be geared towards eliminating torture rather than covering it up. Under CAT, no evidence of torture should ever be deemed "classified"; rather, it should be investigated.

Second, the ban will allow governments to over-classify in order to keep certain cases out of the courts. Recent cases have made it abundantly clear that governments cannot be trusted to put justice above politics, and the British government has repeatedly invoked the 'national security' argument on intelligence evidence when in fact the issue is one of embarrassment.

4. For a timeline of events leading to the release of the Green Paper, click here.

5. Reprieve, a legal action charity, uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay. Reprieve investigates, litigates and educates, working on the frontline, to provide legal support to prisoners unable to pay for it themselves. Reprieve promotes the rule of law around the world, securing each person's right to a fair trial and saving lives. Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years working on behalf of people facing the death penalty in the USA.

Reprieve's current casework involves representing 15 prisoners in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, assisting over 70 prisoners facing the death penalty around the world, and conducting ongoing investigations into the rendition and the secret detention of 'ghost prisoners' in the so-called 'war on terror.'

Downloads

2011_10_19 Green Paper on Justice and Security

David Laws

2011-05-12T21:00:00.000+01:00

should be facing a police investigation, as should any other person who defrauds the state of £40,000.

Leaving Afghanistan...

2010-12-15T00:02:00.005Z

The tactic support which the Liberal Democrats have given to the war on Afghanistan is even more shameful than the their role in imposing the most draconian cuts on local government for generations.

Too many wedding parties have been bombed, the government of nuclear-armed Pakistan teeters constantly on the brink of falling into the arms of Islamic extremists due to the destabilisation of Afghanistan, hundreds of British soldiers have fallen and more civilians have now died than were killed on 9-11 & British forces are having no more success than the Soviets in bringing Helmand province "under control".

The party's stance on the Iraq war was a key factor in establishing our creditability for standing up for the rule of international law and humanitarianism. The continuing support for the Afghanistan war will steadily erode this credibility, even as the media's portrayal of the conflict as a "good war", as will the shameful lack of concrete action (aside from occasionally muted rhetoric from Nick Clegg) taken against Israel by a coalition government of which the LibDems are a part.

If liberals being in government is to mean anything beyond plush offices and the occasional administrative deck-chair shuffling, the grass-roots of the Liberal Democrats will need to start to consider their own direct action against a leadership all too keen to travel the same discredited path into power as all other well-meaning ministers since 1945.

Time for students to grow up

2010-11-10T17:23:00.004Z

U-turns are always hard to countenance in politics, especially u-turns as drastic as reversing a party's opposition to any rises in university tuition-fees.

However, the pathetic whining of the NUS in their coalition with comfortably salaried lecturers, and a shamefully cynical manipulation of mostly well-heeled students, should make even the staunchest opponent of tuition fees consider their position. The current economic climate demands no less, with a ballooning deficit. Without tutition-fee rises, the prospect would loom of even deeper cuts to a sector that is alledged to have some of the best universities in the world.

The burden of proof - as Lorley Burt said earlier today - now lies with the opponents of tuition-fees to tell people where the short-fall funds should come from during a period where the deficit is at its highest in living memory.

Tim Farron for Lib Dem President on Facebook...

2010-10-06T16:15:00.000+01:00

Sugar likens Lib Dems to Leyton Orient...

2010-10-05T13:47:00.002+01:00

This from the man who gave us 'Amstrad', commonly acknowledged as the Coventry City of the computing world ;-)

Lib Dems: Achieving Things in Government

2010-09-30T11:20:00.001+01:00

1) Flexible working right to be extended

2) Minimum wage rises to £5.93 an hour

David Miliband: 'Unite behind Ed'

2010-09-27T14:49:00.001+01:00

and they were!!!

Bruisers 0 Compromise 1

2010-07-29T22:20:00.000+01:00

One is bound to ask, if Ed Balls is the answer for Labour, what's the question. His needlessly aggressive and arrogant approach to the coalition negotiations as witnessed here is probably one of the reasons Labour finds itself in opposition now, rather than in government.

The other fact which became clear is that had a person other than Gordon Brown (i.e. David Miliband, who evidently lacked the neccesary political 'ticker' to challenge him) been occupying No.10, there would have been a greater chance of some sort of Lib-Lab deal rather than the impatient rush to get out of office and avoid the consequences of Brown's ruinous legacy which was probably the main motivator behind the rush to get to the Palace before a proper alternative government was formed.

Afghanistan - Someone Break This Shameful Silence

2010-07-28T22:42:00.000+01:00

The Liberal Democrats, in contrast to the majority of Labour and Tory MPs, have an honourable record in voting against the invasion of Iraq. However, the shameful lack of dissent from the Liberal Democrat MPs on the all-party consensus over the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan reminds us of the sacrifices which are sometimes made when a party leaves opposition and becomes part of a government in this country.

Never mind that wedding parties seems to be particularly favourite target of US bombs and missiles, never mind that more civilians have now been killed than on 9/11, never mind the corruption of large swathes of the Afghan government whose "democracy" we are supposedly fighting to protect, and never mind the continuing persecution of non-Muslims and the use of sharia legal "remedies".

The presence and actions of NATO troops in this country, far from safe-guarding the world against terrorism, is actually fueling and nurturing militancy and extremism, not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan, a country which has nuclear weapons and whose intelligence services are actively encouraging the so-called insurgency.

Collective responsibility means that the LibDem ministers probably cannot dissent from the view of the coalition as a whole - that an orderly withdrawal of troops should not occur until around 2015 - but that does not mean that the views of many party members, and indeed the majority of ordinary voters, should not be given more credibility by finding a much louder and stronger voice from within the parliamentary party.

Lockerbie: Megrahi was framed

2010-07-25T15:14:00.000+01:00

John Pilger: 3 Sept 2009
...The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown’s “repulsion” to Barack Obama’s “outrage”, the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. “But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?” whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. “What will you say to your constituents, then?”

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power”. Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit”. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests”.

“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft – he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness”. The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie – the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the Private Eye website for £5).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer”.

Peversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and open warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centrepiece of Megrahi’s defence.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power”. What a disgrace.

Lib Dem MP Tim Farron attacks 'toxic Tories'

2010-07-23T18:41:00.000+01:00

A Lib Dem MP has said many Tory MPs are "toxic" and claimed David Cameron is using his coalition partners as "cover" for unpopular decisions.

Tim Farron told the BBC the Tory leader gave the Lib Dems such a "good deal" partly to help his own party's image...[read full article here!]

War crimes court to question Campbell

2010-06-30T20:47:00.000+01:00

Sadly, this isn't the Hague wanting to question Alistair Campbell as an accessory to war-crimes, it refers to the hot-tempered model Naomi Campbell

AV? Not really...

2010-06-23T13:38:00.000+01:00

Part of the coalition agreement commits the government to hold a referendum on the Alternative Vote (or Preference voting as it known in Australia) which enables a candidate to be elected by 50% of the overall vote. It is worth examining how it operates in practice and why adopting AV would only be exchanging one flawed electoral system for another.

Supporters of AV argue that a candidate gets elected by having 50% of the vote: if no candidate gets 50% when the first preference are distributed, the second preferences of the candidate with the least votes are added to the remaining candidates and so on until one candidate hits an absolute majority.

Under the Australian system of voting, each elector must number every single candidate in order of preference. Due to this, one of the key planks of any Australian party's election campaign is the "how to vote card" which advises supporters of a particular party how to distribute their preferences.

Because of this, the run-up to each election there is wrangling, horsetrading, and controversy between major and minor parties as to which of them will exchange second preference votes. This means micro parties holding undue influence over the outcome of an election.

To give a bald example: in the UK, tight contests could hinge on the second preference votes of BNP or Green voters. Winston Churchill said of AV that it allows seats “to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates."

Secondly there is the lack of proportionality under the AV system. The Australian House of Representatives is even less representative than the House of Commons. Only three parties - and a handful of independent MPs - are represented. Furthermore, even allowing for AV electing candidates with 50% of the vote, it is not uncommon for governments as a whole to be elected with fewer votes than the opposition receives.

So reluctant as I am to vote for the status quo, voting for something just as bad is not really an option.

Clegg in 2009: Suspend Arms Exports to Israel

2010-06-01T11:21:00.000+01:00

There is a strong case that, given the Gaza conflict, any military exports contravene EU licensing criteria. Reports, though denied, that Israel is using illegal cluster munitions and white phosphorus should heighten our caution. I want an immediate suspension of all arms exports from the EU, but if that cannot be secured, Brown must act unilaterally.

Lib Dems in Govt: Actions, Not Words, needed on Gaza

2010-05-31T17:28:00.000+01:00

Nick Clegg, The Guardian, Tuesday 22 December 2009:

And what has the British government and the international community done to lift the blockade? Next to nothing. Tough-sounding declarations are issued at regular intervals but little real pressure is applied. It is a scandal that the international community has sat on its hands in the face of this unfolding crisis.

No doubt the febrile sensitivities of the Middle East have deterred governments, caught between recriminations from both sides. No doubt diplomats have warned that exerting pressure on Israel and Egypt may complicate the peace process.

But surely the consequences of not lifting the blockade are far more grave? How is the peace process served by sickness, mortality rates, mental trauma and malnutrition increasing in Gaza? Is it not in Israel's enlightened self-interest to relieve the humanitarian suffering?

Nick Clegg should speak out NOW!

2010-05-31T13:56:00.001+01:00

The deadly attack by Israeli Naval forces on the Gaza Aid ships in international waters is outrageous.

For many people, this issue will be a test both of Mr Clegg's political integrity given his article from the Guardian last year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/22/lift-the-gaza-blocade-nick-clegg

Mr Clegg should now put the whole weight of his Office as Deputy Prime Minister behind a clear and unequivocal condemnation of Israel's volation of international law.

David Laws responds to Darling...

2010-05-26T20:50:00.000+01:00