Under legal pressure, Britain’s government promises new guidelines on torture

Under pressure, UK promises torture guidelines

LONDON — The British government promised Monday to quickly issue its spies a fresh set of guidelines on how to avoid being complicit in torture.

The announcement addresses a legal challenge to the existing guidelines, which human rights group Reprieve said allowed British intelligence agents to gather information extracted through torture — even if they weren’t directly involved in the mistreatment.

The group had sued the government in an effort to overturn the current rules, claiming there was compelling evidence to show that the U.K. had been “reaping the fruits” of torture since at least 2002.

But the High Court in London ruled that the issue was moot as new guidelines were in the works.

Britain’s secretive intelligence agencies have been repeatedly been stung by accusations that they colluded with the torture of terrorism suspects abroad — including in the case of ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, one of several former inmates of the U.S. prison camp suing the U.K. for allegedly colluding with what they say was the abuse they suffered there.

Mohamed — an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager — was arrested as a suspected terrorist in 2002 in Pakistan, and alleges that he was tortured there as well as in U.S. custody in Morocco and Guantanamo Bay, from where he was released without charge early last year.

His case has already sparked a criminal investigation which is weighing whether British intelligence officers broke the law when they interrogated him in Pakistan.

In a separate development, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that Britain — along with France and Germany — needed to push its foreign partners harder to make sure that they weren’t using information taken from suspects mistreated abroad.

In cases where credible allegations of torture were made, Human Rights Watch said, intelligance cooperation should be suspended.

“Taking information from torturers is illegal and just plain wrong,” the organization’s Judith Sunderland said in a statement.

Unease over the issue of mistreatment of terror suspects by third parties is what initially prompted the British government to promise to draw up new guidelines on torture and intelligence work for its agents, although their publication has been delayed by several months.

Government lawyer James Eadie said Monday the new rules would be published “very shortly” but gave no specific time frame.