AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT 2016/17

TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT
Internment in Northern Ireland
In December, the government responded to
questions put to it by the European Court of
Human Rights (ECtHR), following a 2014
request by the Irish government to review the
1978 judgment in Ireland v UK, on torture
techniques used in internment in Northern
Ireland in 1971-72.
Rendition
In June, the Crown Prosecution Service
(CPS) decided not to bring any criminal
charges relating to allegations by two Libyan
families that they had been subject to
rendition, torture and other ill-treatment in
2004 by the US and Libyan governments,
with the knowledge and co-operation of UK
officials. In November, the two families –
Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar,
and Sami al-Saadi and his wife and children
– began judicial review proceedings to
challenge the CPS decision.
Armed forces
In September, it emerged that the Royal
Military Police were investigating
approximately 600 cases of alleged
mistreatment and abuse in detention in
Afghanistan between 2005 and 2013.
As of November, the Iraq Historic
Allegations Team, the body investigating
allegations of abuse of Iraqi civilians by UK
armed forces personnel, had concluded or
was about to conclude investigations into
2,356 of 3,389 allegations received.
The Iraq Fatality Investigations, a separate
body established in 2013, reported in
September on the death of 15-year-old
Ahmad Jabbar Kareem Ali, finding that he
drowned after being forced into the Shatt-al-
Basra canal in southern Iraq in 2003 by UK
soldiers. The Ministry of Defence apologized
for the incident.
Allegations of war crimes committed by UK
armed forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2008
remained under preliminary examination by
the Office of the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court.
SURVEILLANCE
In November, the Investigatory Powers Act
(IPA), which overhauled the existing,
piecemeal domestic legislation on
surveillance, became law. The IPA granted
increased powers to public authorities to
interfere with private communication and
information in the UK and abroad. It
permitted a broad range of vaguely defined
interception, interference and data retention
practices, and imposed new requirements on
private companies, facilitating government
surveillance by creating “internet connection
records”. The new law lacked a requirement
for clear prior judicial authorization.
In October, the Investigatory Powers
Tribunal (IPT) ruled that the secret, bulk
collection of domestic and foreign
communications data and the collection of
“bulk personal datasets” had violated the
right to privacy previously, but were now
lawful.
Proceedings were pending before the
ECtHR regarding the legality of the pre-IPA
mass surveillance regime and intelligence
sharing practices. The Court of Justice of the
EU ruled in December that the general,
indiscriminate retention of communications
data under the Data Retention and
Investigatory Powers Act 2014 was not
permitted.
NORTHERN IRELAND: LEGACY ISSUES
The former and current Secretaries of State
for Northern Ireland both referred to those
raising allegations of collusion or focusing on
human rights violations by state agents as
contributing to a “pernicious counter
narrative”. NGOs advocating for
accountability for victims raised concerns
that such language placed their work as
human rights defenders at risk.
In November, the Special Rapporteur on
the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and
guarantees of non-recurrence urged the UK
government to address structural or systemic
patterns of violations and abuses, rather than
focusing solely on existing “event-based”
approaches. He suggested widening the
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