As the media and the public continue to pursue MPs with visceral hatred (and the bankers only slightly less so since they can’t be got hold of so easily), attention is drained away from recent extremely serious new evidence of direct UK involvement in killings and torture either as a result of UK corporate or government negligence or connivance. The cases reported are extremely disturbing, partly because they well be merely the tip of the iceberg, but mainly because the lack of public clamour about them indicates that the moral conscience of the nation has become badly weakened and calloused. It is reported that the Home Office has returned two asylum seekers to the Congo who on arrival were badly beaten and tortured for weeks on end and are now diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The obvious question arises how many others of the 10,000 asylum seekers from the Congo have already been sent back to ‘degrading and inhumane treatment’ or are likely to be sent back under current policies? There are also unanswered allegations that MI5 has been involved in deliberate torture sessions in at least 3 other countries under the so-called War against Terror programme. Does this show that the British Government’s repudiation of torture is merely a figleaf?

The UK Border Agency’s response intones a mantra which looks bureaucratically complacent. It says “We continue to monitor developments in the DRC…..(but) we do not routinely monitor the treatment of individuals once removed from the UK”. It also seeks comfort in the Court of Appeal decision of 3 December last year which upheld a ruling that failed asylum seekers are not at risk of persecution or ill-treatment on return to the DRC simply because they have claimed asylum. But how do they know that if nobody has checked what happens to people when they are deported back to the Congo? And asylum seekers despatched back to the Congo may not be at risk because they claimed asylum in the UK, but rather because of their human rights or political activities in the Congo which led to their claiming asylum in the first place, so the Court of Appeal decision (and the Home Office drawing justification from it) appear misleading and flawed.
But the charge against the Home Office is more serious still. Their own operational guidance states that if people are detained in the Congo, they are likely to suffer degrading and inhumane treatment, in breach of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act. Yet the Home Office is sending asylum seekers back to the Congo (24 were returned a week ago to Kinshasa) knowing that some at least have been detained on arrival and tortured. I intend to raise this in the House next week and demand an independent investigation.
Tragically, this is not an isolated example. More evidence recently has come to light about the close involvement of MI5 officers in the torture of victims sent by ‘extraordinary rendition’ to Pakistan or Middle East destinations. They did not directly administer the torture, but they supplied the questions to be asked and colluded in, indeed orchestrated, the torture if the questions were not fully or satisfactorily answered. One of the victims was Binyam Mohammed who was rendered across three continents, and tortured in each, before being transported to Guantanamo. These are now the subject of high-profile court proceedings, but how many other similar cases have not yet come to light? There are several countries in the world where there is no rule of law and where torture is administratively routine. Britain is not one of those, but the slippage down this path is a frightening indication of how far Britain’s moral decay has gone.

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