OTHMAN (ABU QATADA) v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 35 B. Other reports 1. Amnesty International 112. Amnesty International has produced a number of reports on the treatment of detainees in Jordan. Its most extensive report was published in July 2006, Amnesty International published its report entitled “Jordan: ‘Your confessions are ready for you to sign’: detention and torture of political suspects”. The report criticised Jordan for maintaining a system of incommunicado detention which facilitated torture, particularly under the auspices of the GID, where torture was systemic and practised with impunity. The scope for abuse by the GID was far greater because GID officers were granted the authority of public prosecutors (and thus judicial power), allowing the GID itself to prolong periods of detention for the purposes of interrogation. It was a virtually impossible task for a detainee to prove he had been tortured by the GID when it was the detainee’s word against that of GID officers. The report considered that the introduction of monitoring by the NCHR and the ICRC were positive if qualified steps and both organisations had been prevented from meeting all detainees in GID custody. 113. Although the 2001 amendments to Article 66 of the Code of Criminal Procedure had allowed detainees access to their lawyers, even when in incommunicado detention, in apparent contravention of these provisions, the general practice in state security cases was for detainees to be held in prolonged pre-trial incommunicado detention. There were also apparent contraventions of the right to have a lawyer present during examinations before the Public Prosecutor. The State Security Court had been “largely supine” in the face of torture allegations, failing properly to investigate allegations. Trials before it were frequently unfair; it was prone to convict defendants on the basis of confessions alleged to be extracted by torture. The report noted that, over the previous ten years, one hundred defendants had alleged before the State Security Court that they had been tortured into making confessions; allegations had been made in fourteen such cases in 2005, yet the State Security Court had failed adequately to investigate the claims. Appeal to the Court of Cassation had not been an adequate safeguard. 114. The report described nine case studies of confessions extracted by torture by the GID in state security cases, including that of the millennium conspiracy trial. The report recorded that at least four of the defendants, including Abu Hawsher, had been tortured during GID interrogation, their bodies reportedly showing marks of torture when relatives and lawyers saw them for the first time. Witnesses testified that, in the course of a reconstruction at the crimes scenes, they had seen one defendant, Mr Sa’ed Hijazi, propped up by two guards apparently unable to stand on his own. In