What reason could there be to preserve this wiggle room for ministers to get mixed up in torture, other than the prospect that they will use it?” Torture tipoffs are when one nation provides information to another country despite a real risk of this leading to torture.ĭolan added: “We need a policy that actually prohibits, rather than simply papering over, UK complicity in torture. “We saw these failings time and again during the war on terror, with appalling consequences for people around the world, including British nationals, and it’s now been uncovered that the abduction and brutal torture of British blogger Jagtar Singh Johal may have been unlawfully enabled by a torture tipoff from the UK.”
The human rights group Reprieve said IPCO’s findings highlighted that the current policy on torture and intelligence was not working.ĭan Dolan, Reprieve’s director of policy and advocacy, said: “The government’s torture policy is fatally flawed, wrongly creating the impression that ministers can authorise torture tipoffs, when this is fundamentally unlawful. The MI6 agent was reported for going beyond the limits of their section 7 authorisation under the Intelligence Services Act 1994 to commit certain criminal offences in the discharge of their function, although officers decided no further action was necessary. It also found failures “on several occasions” by the MoD to comply with “the principles”, the published government policy on intelligence and torture, introduced in 2020 to improve oversight of treatment of detainees overseas.įor the first time, IPCO stated that an intelligence service agent had been referred to police on suspicion of committing a criminal offence. In its newly published 2021 annual report, IPCO found the “most significant deficiency” was a failure by agencies – those overseen by IPCO include MI5 and MI6 – to remind ministers there was a “presumption not to proceed” in cases where there is a “real risk of torture”. Doing so could prevent the UK from becoming complicit in torture and help stop the risk of repeating the failings of the “ war on terror”.
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