The High Court is to hear a challenge to the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to prosecute an ex-MI6 director over a family’s rendition to Colonel Gaddafi’s torture chambers in 2004.
MPs will today ( 29 June 2016) debate the UK’s role in the CIA’s rendition and torture programme, for the first time since British prosecutors announced that no charges would be brought over the kidnap and forcible transfer of two families to Gaddafi’s Libya in 2004.
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has reportedly claimed that “the British government never condoned, nor was complicit, in the torture or ill-treatment of detainees, wherever they were held.”
Tony Blair has failed to provide information to MPs about his role in the UK-orchestrated rendition of two anti-Gaddafi dissidents and their families to the Libyan dictator.
A year after the US Senate published a major report into the CIA torture programme, there is no sign of either the UK’s own inquiry or a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service regarding the role the British Government played, says the legal and human rights organisation Reprieve.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ordered intelligence agency GCHQ to destroy illegally collected communications of a Libyan rendition victim.
A normally secretive court is to consider whether the Government should be made to release more information regarding its surveillance of legally privileged communications.
The case brought by a husband and wife subjected to a 2004 ‘rendition,’ jointly organised by MI6, the CIA and Libyan intelligence, is being heard today by the Court of Appeal in London.
Government claims that possible evidence of UK involvement in renditions held in Diego Garcia was damaged by “extremely heavy weather” last month have been questioned by legal charity Reprieve.