The Shadow Foreign Secretary has used her speech to Labour's annual conference to call for a “revolution of values” in UK foreign policy, including an overhaul of the way security assistance is provided to countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has signed a security agreement with Saudi Arabia that appears to promise further training for Saudi police – despite their use of torture and the death penalty.
The UK has failed to check whether training it has provided to Saudi police has contributed to abuses including torture and the death penalty, new research by human rights organisation Reprieve has revealed.
Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee has condemned the Government for the secrecy surrounding the approval of overseas police training, saying the current policy to guard against the human rights risks of such training may not be “fit for purpose.”
The UK College of Policing is teaching the Saudi Arabian interior ministry high-tech forensic skills that risk being “used to identify individuals who later go on to be tortured”, an internal police report obtained by the human rights charity Reprieve reveals.
A Freedom of Information response from the UK College of Policing has revealed that British police have trained hundreds of Saudi officers in the last four years.