Own goal!
Ten of those Charles Clarke wants to deport are Algerians. And he hopes to get them back to Algeria.
This is what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website says about Human Rights in Algeria.
"Alongside the violence committed by the Islamic armed groups over the last decade are numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias, including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings. The UK Government continues to urge the Algerian Government to comply fully with all its obligations under international human rights law, including the investigation of human rights violations, and to grant a visit to Algeria by the UN Special Rapporteurs on torture and on extra-judicial killings. The UK with EU partners has also raised a number of cases with the Algerian authorities"
posted by Tony @ Friday, August 26, 2005
2 Comments:
I suppose the Government reply to this would be that no-one (apart from the Algerian government, presumably) is denying that people are tortured in Algeria: the Home Office position is that it's safe to rely on the written promise of the Algerian government not to torture these particular men, with the added safeguard provided by the proposed independent monitoring arrangements. I hope that to be satisfied, the courts will need to make sure that the wording of any Algerian assurances is a great deal tighter than that used in the message to the Americans about their application for the extradition of Jens Soering to the US, with its feeble expression of hope that if we agree to extradite him, the Americans won't execute him (you quote the excruciatingly inadequate terms of the British message in your accompanying post about the Soering case). No doubt the feebleness of the UK request in the Soering case reflects the awkward problem that the Federal Government of the US has no power to prevent a State executing someone under state law, whatever agreements might have been reached between the British and US federal governments. There could be a parallel here in the case of Algeria: the men whom the home secretary wants to deport could argue that the Algerian government has in practice no control over those (army, secret police, intelligence interrogators, prison staff) who actually do the torturing, so assurances given by that government are worthless, however stringently worded.
The courts might also wonder how much weight to give to a promise not to torture eight or nine named individuals given by a government that denies torturing anyone at all.
Incidentally it's interesting, and doesn't seem to have been widely noticed in recent commentaries, that the UN Convention Against Torture, also cited in your Soering post, expressly forbids governments that have acceded to the Convention (as the UK has) to extradite anyone to a country where there's a reasonable fear that they will be tortured. So the prime minister's threat to amend the Human Rights Act if the courts try to stop him deporting people to countries where people get tortured seems more irrelevant than ever: amending the UK HRA Act can't relieve the UK of its obligations under the European HR Convention, and even if the courts accepted parliament's revised instructions on how to re-interpret Article 3 of that Convention, and even if the government withdrew from the Convention and the Council of Europe, it would still be contravening the Convention Against Torture by deporting the Algerians. This gives added importance to the forthcoming but much delayed judgment of the Law Lords on whether the home secretary is entitled to rely on evidence that may have been obtained by torture in his decisions on deportations and detentions (and control orders, I suppose): and on whether the Torture Convention may be taken into account by the UK courts despite not having been incorporated in domestic law. You and I have both written previously about this question, although in my case without picking up the Torture Convention point in this context -- see on my own blog (Ephems).
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
Most of you when you talk or write about the people who disappeared in Algeria, talk about them like they “just disappeared” from the streets and no one know what happen to them.
The reality is that these people:
- Disappeared after being arrested by armed groups belonging to the Algerian government.
- People from the street witnessed the arrests.
- Many of then were arrested from their homes and taken as prisoners and their parents and families are witness of the arrests.
- Many of them also were taken from work places and people who work with them saw and witness the arrests.
What we are talking here and what you need to correct when you write about the Algerian black list is that these people are “prisoners who disappeared after being arrested”.
The tragedy here is that the number of prisoners who disappeared is in the thousands.
This is what I call the Algerian Black List.
http://www.algeria-watch.org/fr/mrv/mrvdisp/cas_disparitions/liste_disparitions/disparitions_liste_t.htm
The question: Why they disappeared? How come someone disappear in Algeria after being arrested? We can ask hundred of question without answers of course.
We as Algerian know that the people who “disappeared after being arrested” were simply tortured to death and that’s why after being killed by torture the bodies showed the torture and therefore there is no way to give back the bodies to the families.
You guys you must think about the parents of the people who disappeared after being arrested and what they are enduring for years. They saw the police coming one night and taking their kids from them. They trusted them by letting them take them and when they went to ask for the whereabouts of their loved ones they were arrested, threatened or beaten.
Some parents were asked to pay about $100 for each bullet inside the bodies of their kids.
They didn’t have enough money. Too many holes.
I learned my lesson to never let myself or my son arrested by any Algerian forces and if I go back to Algeria and they come to my house one night I’m ready to blow the whole house to save everybody some time. This is the Algerian way. This is the only way.
There is something wrong in Algeria and in Algeria that need to be corrected.
Hakim Talbi, New York
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