Shaker Aamer Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Eric Joyce
Main Page: Eric Joyce (Independent - Falkirk)Department Debates - View all Eric Joyce's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Alistair Burt
I can certainly do that, and am happy to write to my hon. Friend; but I want to make it clear that we take the allegations extremely seriously. We have asked the US Department of Defence to respond to specific allegations about treatment and we will continue to do so. As I say, we think independent access, through the facilities that are available, is important; but I will happily respond to my hon. Friend in due course.
Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Ind)
I take the Minister’s point about the issues to do with mistreatment or otherwise, but does he agree that there is not really a precedent for holding someone, ostensibly as a prisoner of war, for 11 years? The only precedent that I can think of is the gulags after the second world war; that is not something that we would care to accept as a common practice.
Alistair Burt
Let me now deal with some of the questions that colleagues have raised in the debate, starting with why Mr Aamer is in Guantanamo Bay, which is the central question. I will say what I said before: he is not being held by the United Kingdom, so we do not have a reason why he is detained. In our view the detention is wrong and he should not be there. I make that very clear. The United States must satisfy itself that it has reasons.
It is genuinely very difficult to comment on why the United States might think that Mr Aamer is rightly in Guantanamo Bay. We have to discuss the detail with the US to seek to secure his release. That is sensitive, and we do not discuss intelligence matters. We have always held the view that indefinite detention without review or fair trial is unacceptable. We welcome the President’s continuing commitment to closing the detention facility and to maintaining a lawful, sustainable and principled regime for the handling of detainees there. Beyond our making it clear that we do not consider the detention of Mr Aamer to be right or correct, the United States plainly has a different point of view. The process of our arguing for Mr Aamer’s release is seeking to persuade the US; to a certain extent the parliamentary and public pressure in the United Kingdom adds to that sense of persuasion that the detention is not right or appropriate. That remains the Government’s view.