Torture and the Treatment of Asylum Claims

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Tom Tugendhat

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I, too, express my gratitude to the members of the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us the time to debate this subject. I commend the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr Mathias) for her leadership in securing the debate. I note that, in a minor way, the pronunciation of the constituency of the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) risks becoming, for some people, an instrument of torture in itself.

The hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) posed some very relevant and pointed questions to the Minister regarding the training of caseworkers in the Home Office. I will not repeat them, but they were pertinent and ones with which I would very much wish to associate myself.

Like others, I place on the record my appreciation for the many non-governmental and campaign organisations that work in this field. Freedom from Torture was mentioned, and I was present in November at the launch of its most recent piece of work, “Proving Torture”. I have been associated with Reprieve for many years and have campaigned with Amnesty International in different parts of the world over the years, principally on the abolition of the death penalty but also on human rights concerns more widely.

Whenever I have been in other parts of the world, it has struck me that however much we may beat ourselves up about our past misdeeds, foreign policy failings and other things, we are still seen, by and large, as a force for good in the world. That goes to the point that the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) made about the counterproductive nature of torture. It also touches on the point made by the hon. Member for Twickenham that we are a world leader in this area, and it is more important now than ever that we maintain that position.

At Foreign Office questions some time ago, I asked the Foreign Secretary whether he had raised the possibility of sharing intelligence with the Trump Administration in the event that they reverted to the use of torture, such as waterboarding or, as the President said during the campaign, something

“a hell of a lot worse”.

In the House, the Foreign Secretary said that that was an operational matter that he would not comment on —I think it is more a matter of policy myself—but in later correspondence he returned to the quote that the hon. Member for Twickenham offered us from the Prime Minister, who said that

“we do not sanction torture and do not get involved in it. That will continue to be our position.”—[Official Report, 25 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 291.]

Those sentences should be on the desk of every Home Office and Foreign Office Minister. I would like to hear a more express statement about the possibility of sharing intelligence with any country in the world that uses torture, both because of our leadership position and because we must atone for some of our quite recent failings in this area.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The right hon. Gentleman heard me speak, I hope very clearly, about my views. I merely caution that we should use slightly more modified language than, “We share no intelligence with anyone who uses torture.” That would exclude so many people with whom we need a relationship built on trust. In many ways, our intelligence services, rather than NGOs or diplomats, are some of the best people to preach the message of freedom from torture.

[Mr Carmichael]

That is a fair point. I put it in those terms—I know the hon. Gentleman’s background—because we have some damage to repair.

I am mindful of your strictures about the sub judice rule, Mr Bailey. We now have the final Supreme Court judgment in respect of the Government’s preliminary points in the Belhaj and Boudchar case, which I referred to earlier. I will not talk about the substance of that case, because that would clearly be inappropriate and I would be ruled out of order, but it is a matter of public record that the Government so far have spent £750,000 pursuing those unsuccessful preliminary points. The case will presumably go through the courts to whatever conclusion is reached, but it is worth reflecting that we have got this far at the cost of £750,000 but we are just back at the starting line, and a lot more could still be spent on that case. The plaintiffs have offered to settle for £3—£1 each from the Government, the former Foreign Secretary and Sir Mark Allen, whose involvement in the case is fairly well documented.

The al-Saadi case, which was very similar, was settled out of court without any requirement for the case to be taken. More significantly, Belhaj and Boudchar want an apology as well as their £3. No apology was made in the al-Saadi case, but it cost the British taxpayer some £2.2 million. That is why it is important that as we enter a new phase of international relations with a new Administration in the White House, rightly or wrongly, we should have concerns about their approach to torture and put out there the highest possible standards. We should not forget—the Crown Prosecution Service has already said this—that Sir Mark Allen sought political authority for his actions in the al-Saadi and Belhaj cases, so it is difficult for us as a country to deny any knowledge or complicity in them.

Freedom from Torture’s “Proving Torture” report contains several highly concerning statistics from the sample of cases that it examined, and I will remind the House of some of those. Some 76% of the cases that Freedom from Torture studied in preparing that report eventually resulted in successful appeals. I take the Minister’s point that new information is sometimes provided on appeal that was not there in the first instance. Appeals may succeed for any number of reasons, but the fact that 76% of cases resulted in asylum being granted on appeal should concern Home Office Ministers. I suspect that if a judge sitting in a sheriff court in Scotland or perhaps a Crown court in England had 76% of his or her cases overturned on appeal, the Lord Chancellor would look carefully at the way that judge went about his or her business.

There is more context in that report to support my contention that the 76% figure is concerning. In 74% of the cases examined by Freedom from Torture, asylum caseworkers substituted their own opinion for that of clinicians, and in 30% of cases, asylum caseworkers disputed or queried clinicians’ qualifications or expertise. Those things should cause concern. They give context for the 76% of successful appeals that I referred to and relate to the points raised by the hon. Member for Harrow West.

The hon. Member for Twickenham was absolutely right to say that the Home Office has a duty of care towards people who do such enormously difficult and taxing work, from which significant political pressure is never far away and which is done in the professional context of an occasionally toxic debate. I worked as a public prosecutor for some years a long time ago. No one was supposed to work for more than six to 12 months at the very most on cases involving the sexual abuse of children, because they were such difficult and taxing cases, and the people who were involved in that sort of work ended up being burnt out. For that reason, I suspect that rotation among caseworkers who do asylum work should be taken a bit more seriously than it appears to be.

I am mindful of your strictures about time, Mr Bailey, so although I could probably say a great deal more about this subject, I shall conclude my remarks and allow others to take part.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Tom Tugendhat

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat]

I hope the hon. and learned Lady will forgive me if I do not, for reasons of time.

Having been brought up at the foot of a judge who did indeed hold me to account—very actively—I now realise that the judiciary works better when it is appointed without the control of the House and the Government. I will therefore not encourage the Government to invoke section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, and I will speak against it during the investigation that is to be conducted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport over the next 10 weeks.

Members have asked how on earth this measure could possibly bully the regional press. We all know that a free press is the lifeblood of democracy, but the troubles experienced in borough and county councils across our land are partly due to the fact that our regional presses are being silenced. Too many are closing, and too few now have regular reporters in the county council rooms, the borough council rooms or the district council rooms to follow what elected members are saying. I think that what we are doing here will increase the pressure still further. Forcing organisations to join IMPRESS, for example, imposes a cost that many cannot bear.

Other Members have mentioned the unlikelihood of any regional paper or regional organisation hacking a telephone, and it is indeed deeply unlikely. Of course, we all thought it was deeply unlikely that a national paper would do that, and then we found that one had; but that does not matter, because clause 8 does not tell us whether it is likely or unlikely. It merely sets out the penalty, and in doing so, effectively holds all those organisations to ransom. It forces them into organisations like IMPRESS, to which they must pay an extra tax.

Given the parlous economic situation of so many regional media outlets—in my own wonderful county of Kent, many papers have lost their correspondents from various towns—I cannot possibly support the amendment. It would be bad for the regional press and for a free press, and it would therefore be bad for our democracy and for us. Furthermore, it would act as a brake on an essential piece of legislation—a piece of legislation that we need to keep us safe, and to ensure that the safety of all those whom we are here to represent is also guaranteed.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I always listen very carefully to the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), and I noted that he said he was not a Member of the House when these measures became law. I was; I was in fact deputy Chief Whip of the coalition Government when the Leveson committee was set up, when it then reported and when these measures were put through Parliament. I saw rather more of the machinations surrounding this than was perhaps healthy for anyone, but it is disappointing and more than a little depressing that we are back here again debating it today.

I remember the Thursday afternoon when these amendments were tabled. It was the point when collective responsibility had broken down. There was no agreement between my party and the Conservatives and in fact I was up in the Public Bill Office ready with the amendments to be tabled subject to agreement with other parties, and to get that agreement more time was necessary. Spurious points of order were raised, there was a somewhat spurious Division on the House sitting in private, and I think the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who was then in the Opposition Whips Office, went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the Lobbies were not cleared; I will be no more specific than that.

I remember that over the course of the following weekend there was a change of heart by the then Prime Minister, and I remember then the way in which matters proceeded on the basis of an all-party deal. I thought that would be the end of the matter, and I am afraid to say that I see the fact that it is not the end of the matter and we are back here today as something of a breach of good faith on the part of the Conservative party.

But more than all the parliamentary and intra-Government shenanigans at the time, the thing I remember most clearly, and will never forget, is meeting the parents of Milly Dowler at the time when we set up the Leveson inquiry and giving them the solemn pledge that whatever Leveson said was necessary, we as a Parliament would do. We set up Leveson for a reason, and we implemented it for a reason. The reason was, as the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has said, that it was necessary to take this place out of press regulation, and that is what pains me more than anything else about what we have heard from the Treasury Bench today, both from the Minister and earlier from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The time for action is long overdue; there can be no more delay and no more obfuscation.

If we do continue and if we do revisit this, as the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling suggested, we will not just be breaching faith between ourselves as political parties; we will be breaching the acts of good faith and the commitments we made to the parents of Milly Dowler, and I am never going to be part of that.