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Human Rights

I said that we need to give assistance—to help. In fact, paragraph 77 of the Committee's report states:"““We conclude that the European Union can and must do more to help the United States in bringing about the overdue closure of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.””" It is a US decision, but, from my own visit to Guantanamo in 2006, I know that there were people there whom the US wished to send back to certain countries, and that many countries were not prepared to take them. If those Uighurs had been sent back to China, they would certainly not have been treated very well, and they probably would have been executed. Some of them ended up in Albania, and, therefore, the question is what we do with the people who are released, some of whom will not safely be able to return to their country of origin. We also expressed a lot of concern about torture, and we welcomed the fact that the Foreign Secretary made it clear that he considers, and therefore the Government consider, water-boarding to be torture. But that, of course, is not the current US Administration's view. We therefore concluded that US assurances that it does not torture ““cannot be relied upon””, and recommended that the Government analyse whether the US uses additional techniques that might be considered to be torture. In the Government's response, they declined to do so, saying that such an analysis ““would not be meaningful””. I should be grateful for clarification as to whether the Government still regard water-boarding to be a form of torture and, if so, what representations we are making both to the US about torture by its current Administration, and, in other contexts, internationally.