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10 Held Under Antiterror Law Ask British Court to Free Them
Lawyers for 10 non-British prisoners held without trial under antiterrorism laws filed an appeal on Wednesday against the incarceration, arguing that evidence against the detainees may have been extracted under torture from terror suspects being held in United States prison camps. The lawyers went before the Court of Appeal in a preliminary case, seeking permission in part to bring evidence of "the commission of torture" in camps controlled by the United States in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere. "We say that it is an affront to the public conscience for the state to rely in judicial proceedings on evidence obtained by torture," said Ben Emmerson, a lawyer for some of the 17 foreigners who have been declared terrorism suspects in Britain since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
| Apparently it's not an affront to the public conscience to kill people and blow stuff up. |
The detention of foreign terror suspects without trial or charges - and in contravention of part of the European Convention on Human Rights - has become a sensitive issue for the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. In late 2001, Britain adopted emergency laws that permitted, among other things, detention without trial. Human rights advocates have labeled that provision Britain's Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Blair is being pressed by rights advocates and legislators to do more to secure the release of four Britons held at the base in Cuba, and his government is under assault for using emergency powers to detain foreigners. The foreign detainees may leave Britain if another country says it will accept them. They may also challenge their detention before a secret tribunal called the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, but the tribunal is empowered to hear evidence from the authorities in the absence of the suspects or their lawyers and can order detention if it believes there are "reasonable grounds to suspect" links to international terror networks. In March, a Libyan detainee, identified publicly only as M, was set free after the tribunal ruled that there were no reasonable grounds to detain him. But it has ruled in the cases of other suspects that the British government has had "sound material" to support the suspects' detention.
| So 'M' was released -- what happened to 'Q'? |
Mr. Emmerson, who represents eight of the 10 suspects in the current appeal, said he wished to challenge the tribunal's decisions for a variety of reasons including the question of whether it was legally empowered to consider evidence produced by the alleged ill-treatment of prisoners. The 10 detainees represented at the hearing on Wednesday are being held at several locations, including two high security prisons and a high security psychiatric hospital. Some of them have been detained since December 2001.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-07-08 |
