UK Involvement in Rendition

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Bob Stewart

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Commons Chamber

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

I want to say how pleased I am to have secured this Adjournment debate on the subject of the UK’s involvement in rendition. I wish we could find a better word than “rendition” for what this involves. It is a very dry, technical and legalistic term, suggestive perhaps of involvement in a performance of a piece of poetry or a song. It is, in fact, one of those terms that obscures rather than reveals its true meaning.

Rather than find another term for it, let me quote the words of Khadija al-Saadi who at the age of 12 was rendered from Hong Kong to Libya in a joint CIA/MI6 operation in 2004. She describes the 16-hour flight in which her father, an opponent of the now deposed Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, was chained to a seat with a needle stuck in his arm. She wrote:

“I was 12 years old and was trying to keep my younger brothers and my six year old sister calm. The guards took us to see our mother once on the flight. She was crying and told us that we were being taken to Gaddafi’s Libya. Shortly before the plane landed, a guard told me to say goodbye to my father, at the front of the plane. I forced myself ahead and saw him with a needle in his arm. I remember guards laughing at me. Then I fainted. We were taken off the plane and bundled into cars. Hoods were pulled over my parents’ heads. Libyans forced my mother, sister and I into one car, my brothers and father another. The convoy drove to a secret prison outside Tripoli, where I was certain that we were all going to be executed. All I knew about Libya at that time was that Colonel Gaddafi wanted to hurt my father, and that our family had always been moving from country to country to avoid being taken to him. Now we had been kidnapped, flown to Libya, and his people had us at their mercy.”

Khadija’s father, Sami, was subsequently held for six years and severely tortured.

That, Mr Deputy Speaker, is why it is important for this House to debate rendition this evening. That act and all that followed from it was done as a result of the efforts of British intelligence officers. These illegal acts were done in our name, and it is right that Parliament and the public should be told what was done by whom and on whose authority.

The circumstances surrounding the al-Saadi case were one of two sets of circumstances that came to light following the fall of the Gaddafi regime, when documents were found by the organisation Human Rights Watch in the Tripoli office of Gaddafi’s spy chief Moussa Koussa. The content and tone of some of that correspondence is shocking, but it provides an insight into the minds of those responsible. The rendition, it is boasted, was

“the very least we could do for you and for Libya.”

If rendition was the least that he could have done, I hate to think what might have been possible at the upper end of the scale.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

May I clarify a point? Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that our secret services were used to move a person to Libya, under Gaddafi, at the express wish of Gaddafi?

[Mr Carmichael]

That is what I understand the position to be, although obviously our knowledge is incomplete.

The correspondence continues:

“I know that I did not pay for the air cargo but the intelligence on him was British.”

To refer to another human being as “air cargo” is just about as degrading and dehumanising as it is possible to imagine.

When I raised the issue with the Prime Minister today, during Prime Minister’s questions, he told me that

“very few countries in the world would have had such an independent and thorough investigation into an issue like this.”

He was right—up to a point. The investigation of the role of senior British officers in the rendition of the al-Saadi family and another one was carried out by the Metropolitan Police Service. It was a thorough investigation, which does the police credit. At the end of it, a report running to 28,000 pages was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which announced on 9 June that no proceedings would be taken against the suspect in the inquiry.

I shall turn to the question of the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service in a moment, but first I want to address the Prime Minister’s assertion about the rigour of the investigation. As I have said, the Metropolitan Police Service appears to have done a thorough piece of work; the fact remains, however, that the whole investigation only ever happened because, in the chaos following the fall of Gaddafi, someone from Human Rights Watch happened to come across those documents. But for that, we would almost certainly never have known of our country’s involvement in this affair.

A number of issues arise from the statement made by the CPS on 9 June, and I would be grateful if the Minister addressed them in his reply. The first relates to the review of the decision. The decision itself has been greeted with some scepticism and incredulity. I understand that there is to be a review of it, but that the review will be carried out by other CPS officials, subordinate to those who made the decision. Surely a case of such political sensitivity deserves better than that. There is a precedent for the review of a politically sensitive decision being conducted by lawyers who are independent of the CPS: that was done in the case of the decision not to prosecute the late Lord Janner. I suggest that this is another case in which an independent review is appropriate. Will the Minister tell me whether or not there will be such an independent review?

Most remarkably of all, the CPS statement of 9 June concludes that the CPS has sufficient evidence to conclude that

“the suspect had...sought political authority for some of his actions albeit not within a formal written process nor in detail which covered all his communications and conduct.”

Let us pause for a second to consider the significance of that. Officials of the Crown Prosecution Service have evidence that politicians—presumably that means Ministers of the day—were told of an illegal act by British intelligence officers. It cannot be right that officials of the CPS can know that, but we as parliamentarians cannot. It is ironic to think that if the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) had remained in his post as Director of Public Prosecutions, he would know more about this than he can today, having faced the voters and been elected to the House. So how are we to get to the truth here? The Prime Minister when he was the Leader of the Opposition said of rendition:

“As a moral purpose always must be accompanied by moral means, surely we must recognise that, in the last six years, issues like Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition have done huge damage to our moral authority.”—[Official Report, 21 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 267.]

It was unsurprising, therefore, that in July 2010, in the first couple of months of his time as Prime Minister, he set up an independent judge-led inquiry into torture under Sir Peter Gibson. At that time, the Prime Minister took the view, and told this House,

“For public confidence, and for independence from Parliament, party and Government, it is right to have a judge-led inquiry.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 185.]

He expressly excluded the use of the Intelligence and Security Committee for the task. The Gibson inquiry was suspended in 2012 when the documents discovered by Human Rights Watch were published. At that time, the then Secretary of State for Justice, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), said:

“The Government fully intend to hold an independent, judge-led inquiry, once all police investigations have concluded, to establish the full facts and draw a line under these issues.”—[Official Report, 18 January 2012; Vol. 538, c. 752.]

The view expressed by the Prime Minister today about the investigation of this by the Intelligence and Security Committee is the direct opposite of the view he expressed in 2010. When the Minister replies, will he tell the House when Government policy changed on this and why? Surely public confidence demands that a full, independent and judge-led inquiry be reinstated.