OTHMAN (ABU QATADA) v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 39 claims baseless, as they also found the January 2008 torture claims of two men accused of exporting weapons to the West Bank whose criminal cases were ongoing at year’s end. On May 14, the State Security Court sentenced Nidal Momani, Tharwat Draz, and Sattam Zawahra to death for plotting to kill a foreign leader while visiting the country in 2006, but it immediately commuted their sentences to 15 years’ imprisonment. In 2007 and 2008, the defendants claimed they had been beaten and psychologically pressured to confess.” 124. The 2010 Report recorded that Jordanian law prohibited torture; however, international NGOs continued to report incidences of torture and widespread mistreatment in police and security detention centres. In respect of arrest and trial procedures, the Report noted that: “The State Security Court gives judicial police, charged with conducting criminal investigations, authority to arrest and keep persons in custody for 10 days. This authority includes arrests for alleged misdemeanors. In cases purportedly involving state security, the security forces arrested and detained citizens without warrants or judicial review, held defendants in lengthy pretrial detention without informing them of the charges against them, and did not allow defendants to meet with their lawyers or permitted meetings only shortly before trial. Defendants before the State Security Court usually met with their attorneys at the start of a trial or only one or two days before. A case may be postponed for more than 48 hours only under exceptional circumstances determined by the court. In practice, cases routinely involved postponements of more than 10 days between sessions with proceedings lasting for several months. In most cases the accused remained in detention without bail during the proceedings. Several inmates were in detention without charge at year’s end.” The Report also commented that Jordanian law provided for an independent judiciary; however, the judiciary’s independence in practice was compromised by allegations of nepotism and the influence of special interests. V. RELEVANT COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW ON TORTURE AND THE USE OF EVIDENCE OBTAINED BY TORTURE A. The United Nations Torture Convention 1. Relevant provisions of the Convention 125. One hundred and forty-nine States are parties to the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (“UNCAT”), including all Member States of the Council of Europe. Article 1 of the Convention defines torture as: