tick-off from the special rapporteur

The special rapporteur reporting to the UN General Assembly in February this year on ... the promotion and protection of human rights and freedoms while countering terrorism picked out the UK for having interviewed detainees held incommunicado by the Pakistani ISI (they were being held in so-called safe houses and tortured) and for its active participation, through the sending of interrogators or questions or intelligence personnel to witness interrogations, in actions that violated the rights of detainees. The rapporteur considers that such behaviour ‘can be reasonably understood as implicitly condoning such practices’, and that ‘the continuous engagement of foreign officials in some instances constituted a form of encouragement or even support.’ The rapporteur states that ‘the active or passive participation by states in the interrogation of persons held by another state constitutes an internationally wrongful act if the state knew or ought to have known that the person was facing a real risk of torture or other prohibited treatment, including arbitrary detention. This, of course, is what has been staring us in the face in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.