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Armed Forces: Detention

My Lords, referring first to the points made by the noble Baroness, I am pleased that there is an acceptance of the importance of the authority to make detention operations. We have agreements with our allies. They do not have the force of law but we have every confidence that they are effective and that they are being obeyed. We are in constant conversation with our allies on this and we believe the MOUs are being honoured. The procedural changes to allow an improvement in the records essentially involve the creation of a database in the United Kingdom at PJHQ where data from individual operations are collated. We believe that gives us an accurate picture of what is happening today and we believe that the scrutiny of the data that go back to the period in the Statement where we have given accurate figures is a good historical record. We recognise there was a period earlier in the campaigns when the records are poorer. We will not be providing details to the House of operations outside conventional operations. It is not our normal practice to give details of these sorts of operations and we have been consistent in that answer. The review is not being published because of the extent to which it contains classified information. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, does not find the Statement complete. We believe that it is complete in the matters it addresses. I am sorry that the papers are not in our Library. I was reading the Statement as if I were the Secretary of State in another place and his assurance, which I was giving second-hand, was that they were in the House of Commons Library. I shall make sure that officials follow this up. As I said earlier, it is not our policy to reveal any details about operations of our special forces. However, our troops, be they special forces or regular forces, operate to the highest standards and obey international law. We are confident that, in our relationships with our allies, where individuals are apprehended by ourselves but handed over to the US authorities, the memorandum of understanding is honoured and that the standards under which they are detained are to the levels of international law. With regard to these individuals the International Committee of the Red Cross was able to give that kind of support. There is a series of questions which I shall loosely call ““Who knew and when?”” and which are entirely reasonable. It is clear from the record that UK officials at a certain level knew about the detention of the two individuals in the records. It is not clear why they did not raise it at a higher level. We have inspected the record: it is not clear. The US assures us—we have no reason not to accept its assurance—that its own systems failed in these two cases and did not make it clear that they had been captured by UK forces. Therefore, it did not ask us before they were transferred. It was learnt after they were transferred, but only by officials. It was not raised at a senior level until much later and, as I said earlier, there were references, although indirect, to documents which were available to the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary in 2006. In general, we are absolutely clear that, where our own forces are involved with other coalition partners, we shall not be complicit with torture or involved in any situation where we believe there will be torture. We have taken on board all the allegations made by the Special Forces individual, which have been repeated by both noble Lords. They have all been thoroughly investigated where he has provided evidence. My understanding is that there is limited evidence and that none of the allegations has been proven. If they were proven, we would of course take action. Our troops work to the highest standards. We are trying to create high standards; we are proud of how troops perform; and we believe that any limitations shown by our present procedures have been addressed.