Britain ‘complicit in mistreatment and possible torture’ says UN

January 28, 2010 by Infowars Ireland

Human rights report indicates clear evidence of UK role in secret detention of British Muslims

Binyam Mohamed's case is listed in the UN report which says the UK was complicit in mistreatment and possible torture

United Nations human rights investigators have concluded that the British government has been complicit in the mistreatment and possible torture of several of its own citizens during the “war on terror”.

In a report published today that will make difficult reading for ministers who repeatedly denied the UK’s involvement in torture, UN officials have indicated that there is clear evidence of the UK’s role in the secret detention overseas of several British Muslims.

The officials say that such secret imprisonment – or “proxy detentions” – not only facilitates torture, but may amount to torture in its own right. In one starkly worded passage, they warn that if a state’s use of proxy detention had been systematic or widespread it would amount to a “crime against humanity”.

The 226-page UN report follows the publication two months ago of a dossier entitled Cruel Britannia, from the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch, whose researchers interviewed several Pakistani intelligence agents who alleged that they had tortured British terrorism suspects on behalf of their UK counterparts. It also follows a series of disclosures in the Guardian about the role played by officers of MI5, MI6 and Greater Manchester police in the detention and questioning under torture of terrorism suspects held in Pakistan and elsewhere.

The UN investigation into torture and rendition across the globe since 9/11 lasted several years and was led by Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on terrorism and human rights, and Manfred Nowak, special rapporteur on torture. In a move that will do little to ease the discomfort of western governments that were the focus of the investigation, the two men and their aides were assisted by members of a UN working party on secret detentions that was first set up in 1979 to investigate the fate of people who were “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime in Chile.

Their report concludes that secret detention “amounts to a case of enforced disappearance” and that it is “a manifold human rights violation that cannot be justified under any circumstances, including during states of emergency”.

Listing those cases in which they conclude that a state has been complicit in a secret detention, the authors highlight “the United Kingdom in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed, Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed and Rashid Rauf”.

Ahmed, 34, from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, was detained in Pakistan in 2006. MPs have heard that after evidence of his terrorist offences had been gathered he was allowed to fly from Manchester to Islamabad, and that MI6 then suggested to a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency that its officers should detain him as he was a dangerous terrorist.

After MI5 and Greater Manchester police drew up a list of questions to be put to Ahmed, the Pakistani agents who were questioning him ripped out a number of his fingernails. Ahmed alleges he was also beaten, whipped and deprived of sleep. He was later deported to the UK, tried and convicted of terrorism offences and is now serving a life sentence at Full Sutton prison near York. Read more…