Human Rights Watch says Pakistani intelligence officials have confirmed torture took place with full knowledge of British agents
Further evidence of the close involvement of British agents in the torture of British citizens in Pakistan has emerged during a series of interviews with Pakistani intelligence officers.
Researchers from the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) say several Pakistani officials have corroborated accounts of torture given by several victims. The officials not only made clear that their counterparts in British intelligence were fully aware of the methods they were employing during interrogations but claim the British agents were “grateful” it was happening.
In a statement issued today , HRW said senior Pakistani officials had told it “on numerous occasions” that British officials were aware of the mistreatment of a number of terrorism suspects from the UK, including Rangzieb Ahmed and Salahuddin Amin, who are now serving life sentences in the UK, Zeeshan Siddiqui, whose whereabouts is unknown, and Rashid Rauf, who is said to have died in a US missile strike after escaping from custody.
HRW said senior officials in Pakistan had confirmed the “overall authenticity” of the allegations made by Ahmed, from Rochdale, who had three fingernails ripped out of his left hand after MI5 and Greater Manchester police drew up a list of questions and handed them to his Pakistani captors.
The sources said that an account given by Amin, from Luton, of the manner in which he was tortured in between meetings with MI5 officers was “essentially accurate”, adding that his was a “high pressure” case in which the demand for information made by both British and American intelligence officers was “insatiable”.
HRW says it was told by senior Pakistani officials that the UK and the US were “party” to Amin’s detention and were “perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so”.
HRW was told by senior Pakistani intelligence officers that their British counterparts were well aware that Siddiqui, from London, was being “processed in the traditional way”. These sources said they worked so closely with the British officials that those officials were in effect interrogating Siddiqui even though they were not in the torture chamber.
In other cases, Pakistani agents who were dealing with their British counterparts while torturing British citizens say they were “under pressure to perform” and to extract as much information as possible.
Furthermore, HRW says a British intelligence source has told it that plans to deport one British citizen from Pakistan to the UK and prosecute him for terrorism offences had to be dropped because the individual had been so severely tortured.
The Pakistani interrogators’ accounts of their close working relationship with British intelligence officers are to be detailed in a HRW report later this year.
In today’s statement it said: “Officials in both the Pakistani and UK governments have privately confirmed to Human Rights Watch that British officials were aware of specific cases of mistreatment, knew that Pakistani intelligence agencies routinely used torture on detained terror suspects and others and failed to intervene to prevent torture in cases involving British citizens and in cases in which it had an investigative interest.
“A well placed official within the UK government told Human Rights Watch that allegations of UK complicity made by Human Rights Watch in testimony to the UK parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee in February 2009 were accurate. The official encouraged Human Rights Watch to continue its research into the subject. Another Whitehall source told Human Rights Watch that its research was ‘spot on’.
“According to these UK officials, as a result of co-operation on specific cases, the Pakistani intelligence services shared information from abusive interrogations with British officials, which was used in prosecutions in UK courts and other investigations. UK law enforcement and intelligence officials passed questions to Pakistani officials for use in interrogation sessions in individual cases knowing that these Pakistani officials were using torture.”
HRW said there was now a compelling case for a judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in torture in Pakistan. Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director, said: “The prime minister, the foreign secretary, former prime minister Tony Blair and others have repeatedly said that the UK opposes torture. They repeatedly deny allegations that the UK has encouraged torture by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. But saying this over and over again doesn’t make it true. There is now sufficient evidence in the public domain to warrant a judicial inquiry.”
A gift for the quangophobes
Trevor Phillips’s super-charged army of fairness is mired in controversy. It is much too important to be allowed to fail
The latest stink at the Equality and Human Rights Commission is like an ad for the policies of David Cameron – “Quangos really are rubbish”. To recap: 18 months ago the EHRC took on the work of the commissions for racial equality, gender equality and disability rights – adding religious, age and sexuality discrimination, for slow days. All were rolled into one supercharged army of fairness, headed by Trevor Phillips. Feminists were unimpressed because Phillips hadn’t seemed committed to the Equal Opportunities Commission. Race and disability campaigners were unhappy because both their commissions were hard-won, effective organisations, and to see them rolled into a super-quango … well, to fill those roles with the same vigour, it would have to be pretty super. Which it has turned out not to be at all.
The latest controversy is a sex discrimination case brought by an employee, Brid Johal, who says she was passed over for promotion while on maternity leave. First, it’s appalling if an equality body can’t even police its own discrimination. Second, Johal’s case is being brought by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – if she didn’t have an appropriate union, the EHRC would be exactly the body she’d look to, to take her on as a test case. So she’d be really stuffed. (Unless it has a policy on bringing cases against itself? Quango-tastic.)
Johal’s case is the only one in court, but the PCS has between 25 and 30 grievances pending against the EHRC, mostly addressing bullying and unfair treatment at work. A union press officer says that the entire commission lacks what is known as a dignity at work policy. The union has been pressuring the commission to set this up for over a year. “They’re not exactly practising what they preach,” he understates. Never mind promulgating equality and fairness nationwide, never mind leading by example: even as an advert for the possibilities of fairness in the modern workplace, the EHRC is laughable.
This is nothing, however, on how badly it besmirches the concept of the quango. It is constantly hovering between accusations of incompetence and corruption. In March the National Audit Office wouldn’t sign off its accounts, because of “irregularities”. Nothing huge – missing laptops, strange occurrences in which CRE staff appeared to be compensated for being made redundant, only to be immediately re-employed by the new body.
Phillips has been personally criticised over a conflict of interests (juggling his EHRC role with freelance consultancy work on diversity). There was some stunning incompetence when the EHRC first started – the (mainly female) staff who had migrated from the EOC were on lower pay grades than those from the other two commissions and no proper adjustments were made. So it sprang into life with a systemic pay gap, before it had even addressed any of its main concerns, like the pay gap. Of the various conflicts between Phillips and Nicola Brewer, the former chief executive, insiders cited differing attitudes to handling public money.
Ideologically, the headline-grabbing problems have been between Phillips and the old guard of the CRE (specifically, for making light of institutional racism in the police force). Feminists have as much, if not more, cause for disappointment. The EOC did tremendous work for women in the workplace, including some research on discrimination met by black and minority ethnic women that could have changed the entire debate about both racism and the pay gap, had it been followed up. But it never was.
Katherine Rake, the outgoing head of the Fawcett Society, says: “We would be a more militant voice, but the EOC , as a statutory agency, could command headlines in a way that we couldn’t. Since the merger, there’s been a loss of specific focus and the loss of a concerted voice.” One example she gives is Alan Sugar’s appointment as business tsar – it would have been just unthinkable for the EOC to let that pass, given Sugar’s oft-repeated views on how he tears up the CVs of women who look a bit fertile. The EHRC didn’t even comment.
To call this the worst quango would be rash, but it must be among the worst, surely. And yet, even when riven by internal divisions, mired in an embarrassing court case, and with a question mark over the survival of its chairman, it still makes significant, respected points. This week it unmasked the fallacy at the heart of far-right rhetoric (that migrants skipped the queue for social housing and services; they don’t) – very simply, and I imagine pretty cheaply, by collating research already in the public domain.
We need organisations that aren’t militant, or even overtly political, that are measured and sensible, government-funded but not partisan, to put out messages like this. One of the reasons the EHRC even catches so much hostility – when it probably doesn’t waste any more money than, say, any given police force – is the passionate loyalty and admiration commanded by the bodies it replaced. And one of the things it reminds us of (though, granted, sometimes by accident) is how valuable these organisations can be.