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Human Rights Annual Report 2005

That issue was touched on in the evidence that the Committee received, particularly from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, but I have to say that we need to do more work on the subject. I am sure that we will look into it in coming months. We also considered the International Criminal Court, which is now dealing with its first few cases. I should be grateful if the Minister would tell us how many countries have now ratified the treaty establishing the court, and whether he anticipates any further cases being referred to it in the near future. Our Committee strongly supported establishing such a court but, clearly, it has to be effective and to deal with cases in a timely way. I should be grateful for an update. I shall now touch on a few subjects in greater detail. I have already mentioned rendition and torture, but associated with them is, of course, the United States’ facility in Guantanamo Bay. Our Committee has consistently pressed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for greater clarity on its policy on Guantanamo. We have pressed Ministers to be more outspoken in their condemnation of the very lengthy detention—now running into several years—of a number of suspects there, who have no legal status and for whom there is no legal process. British detainees were released, but people who were resident in this country are still detained there. The fact that no British citizens are detained there does not alter the fact that many hundreds of people from all over the world are detained there. There are strong, principled objections to the existence of that facility and to the way in which it operates. In February our report called on the Government to ““make loud and public”” objections. Since then, I have been greatly encouraged by the fact that the Attorney-General, in an official speech, gave what he called a ““personal view”” about the camp, calling it unacceptable. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office response to our report uses the same word—““unacceptable””—to describe the circumstances under which detainees continue to be held. I note that last week even President Bush said that he would like to empty the camp, although he does not feel able to do so quite yet. Clearly, there is a dilemma for the United States: how will it deal with the several hundred people in Guantanamo? Will it release them, transfer them back to the countries from which they came, or shift them to the territorial United States and detain them there? Many people there may well represent a continuing serious threat, but that does not mean that Guantanamo can be a long-term solution to the problem arising from events in 2001 and 2002, which is when most of the people there were taken into detention in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or areas related to them. Will the Minister take this opportunity to state clearly the Government’s position on Guantanamo Bay? I am asking him to speak not personally, but officially. Will he say that the existence of Guantanamo is unacceptable and will he today call for it to be closed down? If he is not prepared to go that far, will he at least tell us what changes in the circumstances in which detainees are held would make it possible for the British Government to call for it to be closed or, alternatively, would make continued detention of those men acceptable to our Government? There is still a lack of clarity on the Government’s position as a whole, and greater clarity would be helpful. I now come to rendition, an issue that our Committee has been pursuing for more than 16 months. We know that there have been flights associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency into, out of, or through the UK in recent years, but it is far from clear which of those movements, if any, were connected with the concept of rendition. In February this year, when our Committee was in Washington, we had discussions with a number of officials, including people in the State Department, and it was suggested to us that the flights might simply have carried cargo of various kinds—individual American agents, forensic evidence, computer discs, documentation—and not necessarily detainees. There have been a number of ministerial statements on the subject, and we were recently at last given clear statements that, since 1998, Ministers have agreed to only two requests by US authorities to render a suspect through the UK or our overseas territories. It is regrettable that it has taken so many questions, so much effort, and so many repeated requests to get the Government to make those statements. Much of the controversy around the issue would have been avoided if earlier statements had been made, if there had been earlier clarity on the facts of the situation, and if the Government had been more forthcoming earlier. In particular, the Government could have avoided a lot of bother with our Committee if it had responded fully and frankly to our Select Committee when we first raised the issue in early 2005. Instead, we got what seemed to us a reluctant drip-feed of information. Eventually, answers were given—not, in the first instance, in response to our inquiries, but in answer to questions asked by Opposition spokespersons in the House. There is a lesson here for Departments, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: if they want to avoid ongoing controversy about an issue, it is better to come up with the facts early rather than in a drip, drip, drip fashion, while there are ever more headlines on the subject and ever more issues raised about it—and eventually the information comes out anyway. I am not saying that we have all the facts now, but we certainly know more than we did when we started asking questions. It would have been helpful if, over the past 18 months, our Committee had been given more information in response to our questions, rather than us finding it out from other sources. The Council of Europe recently published a report by a Swiss member, Dick Marty, but as far as I can see—and I have read it—it contains very little that is new and little hard evidence. I understand that a report of the European Parliament temporary committee is due. It, too, is investigating the issue, but I am not aware that the report contains any new information. The European Parliament adopted a resolution, almost unanimously, just a few days ago. It was supported by all the political groupings. I do not want to raise controversy within the Conservative party, but the European People’s party supported it, as well as the Socialist group, the Liberal group and others. That resolution called overwhelmingly for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. There is other related information. A recent report by Amnesty International alleges that our Government provided the United States with information that led to two individuals being rendered from Gambia. Can the Minister comment on that report and give us any information about that accusation? It would be helpful to know whether there is any basis for that allegation or whether it is false. Ministers are aware that public concern on the matters is genuine. We need clear, full explanations, otherwise the speculation will continue, and there will be endless, almost frenzied, media interest, which is not helpful either for governance or for human rights in general. Finally, before I make some rapid progress in order to conclude, the Government responded to questions about the use of intelligence gained through torture. They did not respond fully to our recommendation that they should clearly set out their policy on the use of information derived by other states through torture, and encourage a public debate on the ethical dilemmas they face. The response we got restates the opposition to torture, which is welcome, and deals with practical considerations, such as the unreliability of evidence and so on. However, it does not engage with the ethical dilemma. It would be helpful to have a clear statement of the Government’s attitude as to whether we are prepared to take information or intelligence from dubious sources. Are the Government content with that or do they believe that it raises difficult ethical questions? In the time left to me, I would like to touch on the situation in a few specific countries. Other countries will come up during the debate, no doubt. The first of these is topical: there is a good article by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian today, which refers to the situation in Burma. Our report highlights the position in Burma, where there is political and ethnic oppression by the military Government. We recommended that the UK Government maintain pressure on the Burmese military regime and work with the United Nations and other bodies to create such pressure. The Government’s response said that they had done so, that council members agreed that Burma faced a number of problems and that the international community should do more to address them. They also said that they were open to further discussion on the issue. In the spirit of further discussion, perhaps it is time for more rigorous statements to be made to other security council members—particularly the Government of the People’s Republic of China—about the importance of securing the freedom of the important political leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won an election about 15 years ago, but has been restricted, detained and imprisoned ever since. It would be a symbol of the importance of human rights in Asia and the world if she were given her freedom and were able to campaign and organise politically in the way wanted by the vast majority of people in Burma. I turn briefly to the middle east. I am not going to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian issue or others that we touched on during the debate we had the last time I introduced a human rights report. I would rather talk about two other countries in the region. The Committee’s report was critical of the lack of coverage in the Foreign Office report on the human rights situation in Syria. We are pleased that in their response the Government promised to include more on Syria in the report they will produce this year. I hope that they will and that the report will focus on Lebanon, where Syria is implicated seriously in the assassination of former Prime Minister Hariri, and a number of other violent incidents and human rights abuses. I would like to raise another issue that is not in our report, but is in that of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—I can be self-critical of our Committee. Today, we have seen terrible events in Sri Lanka. The situation there is deteriorating fast. Bombings, killings and the upsurge in violence raise serious issues of human rights abuse, and I hope that the Government will do far more to get the Sri Lankan negotiations back on track in order to stop the upsurge in violence and stop the human rights abuses.