Former military lawyer says The Hague might step in if Britain fails to launch inquiry

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Senior Scotland Yard officers are studying a parliamentary report that revealed the true scale of the UK’s involvement in torture and rendition after 9/11, as pressure mounts for a police investigation or judge-led inquiry.



Parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) recommended that police should consider investigating the role that an MI6 officer and a military interrogator played in the torture of detainees.

However the committee’s investigation, chaired by the former attorney general Dominic Grieve, detailed a mass of other human rights abuses, including 598 instances of UK intelligence officers being involved in torture, and 31 rendition operations that were either planned, agreed or financed by the UK.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “The Metropolitan police service is aware of the publication of the intelligence and security committee’s report on detainee mistreatment and rendition and is reviewing its contents.”

There were warnings from a former senior military lawyer that if any of the rendition operations were conducted during armed conflict, they would amount to war crimes – and that the international criminal court at The Hague might step in if the UK does not investigate.

Lt Col Nicholas Mercer, who was the British army’s most senior army lawyer in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, said: “The revelations about the security services and others and their complicity in rendition and torture are deeply troubling for the government.

“Where these offences took place within the context of an international armed conflict, they amount to war crimes, and if the British government fails to prosecute then The Hague is able to do so instead.”

Meanwhile, senior Labour figures also began to call for an independent and judge-led inquiry into the human rights abuses, which all happened during the New Labour era.

True scale of UK role in torture and rendition after 9/11 revealed Read more

They are angry that Theresa May prevented the ISC from questioning junior and middle-ranking MI6 and MI5 officers, which Grieve said had hampered his committee’s inquiry.

The shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, said: “It is now clear from the published reports that the intelligence and security committee was denied access to individuals, severely limiting its ability to give as comprehensive a resolution to this scandal as it would have liked.

“Its criticisms of ongoing inadequacies on guidance relating to torture and rendition also makes a judge-led inquiry – that the government is so keen to avoid – inescapable.”

Clive Lewis, the shadow business secretary, said an inquiry would need to establish what those in the government at the time knew, including Tony Blair and the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw.

He said he was concerned that May had prevented the ISC from interviewing key witnesses.

Lewis, who was asked about torture and rendition on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday, said on Friday: “If the investigation was hampered by Downing Street, we really do have to get to the bottom of this.”

He added that the issue should go to a security-cleared judge. He said it was important to resolve, because the UK portrayed itself as a rules-based society and there were authoritarian countries around the world that would be looking at how the UK responded.

“Straw has questions to answer. People will want to know who else in the cabinet knew and you know where that leads to. That is a legitimate question to ask.

“No one is above the law. It is not about a witch-hunt of Tony Blair or Jack Straw. It is about getting to the truth.”

The ISC investigation began more than four years ago after David Cameron, then prime minister, shut down a judge-led inquiry into the UK’s involvement in rendition and the mistreatment of terrorism suspects. The judge-led inquiry had been set up following a series of disclosures in the Guardian and the courts.

In a second report, the ISC expressed concern that too few safeguards and policies were in place to prevent the UK from again becoming embroiled in human rights abuses.

Grieve said: “We find it astonishing that, given the intense focus on this issue 10 years ago, the government has failed to take action. There is no clear policy, and not even agreement as to who has responsibility for preventing UK complicity in unlawful rendition.”

Last month May issued a public apology to two victims of a UK-US-Libyan operation, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, who was pregnant when MI6 assisted in their kidnapping.