Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition Debate
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Joanna Cherry
Main Page: Joanna Cherry (Scottish National Party - Edinburgh South West)Department Debates - View all Joanna Cherry's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition
Joanna Cherry Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Sir Alan Duncan
There will of course be a formal Government response to the Committee’s reports within 60 days, and if it is thought that any such comment is needed in that regard, of course it will be made.
I thank my hon. Friend for everything that he does in the Council of Europe, a body in which there are many controversies and in which his voice, and that of the United Kingdom, do an enormous amount to uphold the standards that we would like to see in countries across the world.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
When the Attorney General apologised earlier this year for UK involvement in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar, he told Parliament that the Government had
“enacted reforms to ensure that the problems of the past will not be repeated.”—[Official Report, 10 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 927.]
However, the ISC has concluded that the Government’s policy on torture
“falls short in a number of areas”,
and has warned that
“a full review is long overdue.”
Do the Government still believe that their reforms would prevent any repeat of these abuses?
Sir Alan Duncan
The Prime Minister, on behalf of the Government, apologised unreservedly to Mr Belhaj and his wife in May this year, saying that we were profoundly sorry for the ordeal that they had suffered and for the role that we had played in it. As we said at the time, the UK Government have learnt many lessons from this period, and I believe that those lessons have now been converted into much-enhanced practices which are built into the DNA of our intelligence agencies and all who work for them. The consolidated guidance that forms the bedrock of this will be studied further by Sir Adrian Fulford. I hope that, taken together, all that will satisfy and reassure the House that we both set the highest standards and meet them.