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Intelligence and Security Committee

I mean that it is in the report that has not been published. It is not lost, but it has got lost in the wash. It will come out when the report comes out, but it is a pity that we do not have it today, because we could have had a more informed debate about all this. There have been recent allegations that the Security Service has been complicit in torture. The allegations are not that MI5 officers have tortured, but that an individual detained by another country has been mistreated by officers of those countries and that the Security Service was aware of that, and therefore complicit in it. The position is not helped, of course, by the lack of any legal definition in UK law of complicity. The allegations raise key legal, political and ethical questions. Individual allegations are, as I have said, a matter for the investigatory powers tribunal, and not for us. That is a common misunderstanding. We have previously referred individuals to the tribunal. That being said, individual cases sometimes point towards policy failings, or towards structural or systemic failures within the agencies. Those do fall within our remit, and that is why we took this matter up. There is one further aspect that deals not with facts or evidence but simply with allegations. Mr. Mohamed alleges that he was subjected to extremely serious physical torture in Morocco. We must be clear that the courts have not said that the UK had any involvement, direct or indirect, in that mistreatment. However, the agencies did pass questions to the Americans without knowing where Mr. Mohamed was being held, and there is a question as to whether that involves them, however indirectly, in how he was treated, wherever he was. First, however, we do not have the facts. Secondly, this is, sadly, an unavoidable problem. We do not get told where detainees are being held or how they are being treated by other Governments. The only way in which we could ensure that we were not implicated in any mistreatment, however indirectly, would be not to deal with anyone, and that would leave the UK unable to protect itself. I do not think that I have ever before commented on—let alone criticised—the remarks of a member of the judiciary. They are as proud of their independence as we should be of ours. However, the remarks of Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, in a judgment that received much publicity, are worthy of comment. The House will recall the huge controversy that arose when the first draft judgment and the counsel for the Foreign Secretary's letter were leaked to the press, and I shall not go into that further. In the final draft judgment, Lord Neuberger said that""some security services' officials appear to have a dubious record relating to actual involvement and frankness about any such involvement with the mistreatment of Mr. Mohamed when he was held at the behest of US officials. I have in mind in particular Witness B but the evidence in this case suggests it is likely there were others"." As Jonathan Sumption QC said in his letter to the court, that was an astonishing thing for a judge to say without giving anyone a chance to explain themselves. I hope that if I ever found myself before Lord Neuberger and I made allegations, he would require me to substantiate them with evidence. I hope, too, that if allegations were made against me, I would be given a full opportunity to answer them and to produce evidence to the contrary before he came to make a judgment. How those remarks can fail to have some effect on the case of witness B, should it come to court, is another matter. That he has already been linked by so senior a judge with having "a dubious record"—