Breaking: Torture evidence inadmissible in UK courts, Lords rule
Staff and agencies
Thursday December 8, 2005, 10.45 am
Evidence that may have been obtained by torture cannot be used against terror suspects in British courts, the House of Lords ruled today.
A panel of seven Law Lords voted unanimously to allow an appeal by eight detainees who are being held without charge on suspicion of being involved in terrorism, against a controversial Court of Appeal judgment passed in August 2004.
The appeal court voted last year that if evidence was obtained under torture by agents of another country with no involvement by the UK, it was usable and there was no obligation by the government to inquire about its origins.
What can be said except, ‘woohah’? You may chide me all you want for my faith in outmoded insitutions, but I told you the Lords wouldn’t let us down. More on that story later, as Kirsty Wark would no doubt say.
UPDATE. I Y Lord Bingham.
Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the former Lord Chief Justice who headed the panel, said English law had regarded “torture and its fruits” with abhorrence for more than 500 years.
“The principles of the common law, standing alone, in my opinion compel the exclusion of third-party torture evidence as unreliable, unfair, offensive to ordinary standards of humanity and decency and incompatible with the principles which should animate a tribunal seeking to administer justice,” he said.
