20 OTHMAN (ABU QATADA) v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT “[T]he prohibition on receiving evidence obtained by torture is not primarily because such evidence is unreliable or because the reception of the evidence will make the trial unfair. Rather it is because ‘the state must stand firm against the conduct that produced the evidence’. That principle applies to the state in which an attempt is made to adduce such evidence. It does not require this state, the United Kingdom, to retain in this country to the detriment of national security a terrorist suspect unless it has a high degree of assurance that evidence obtained by torture will not be adduced against him in Jordan... The issue before SIAC was whether there were reasonable grounds for believing that if Mr Othman were deported to Jordan the criminal trial that he would there face would have defects of such significance as fundamentally to destroy the fairness of his trial or, as SIAC put it, to amount to a total denial of the right to a fair trial. SIAC concluded that the deficiencies that SIAC had identified did not meet that exacting test. I do not find that in reaching this conclusion SIAC erred in law.” 63. Lord Hoffmann found that there was no Convention authority for the rule that, in the context of the application of Article 6 to a removal case, the risk of the use of evidence obtained by torture necessarily amounted to a flagrant denial of justice. 64. Lord Hope agreed. He accepted that this Court had adopted an “uncompromising approach” to the use at trial of evidence obtained by torture but the evidence before SIAC did not come up to that standard. There were allegations but no proof. The assertion that there was a real risk that the evidence was obtained by torture was not enough to prohibit removal. He recalled SIAC’s findings that the retrial would probably not comply with Article 6 if Jordan were a party to the Convention but would take place within a legally constructed framework. There was sound evidence that the State Security Court, which was not a mere tool of the executive, appraised the evidence and tested it against the law. SIAC had therefore been entitled to find as it did on the evidence. 65. Lord Brown agreed with Lord Phillips and, referring to the majority of the Grand Chamber in Mamatkulov and Askarov, cited above, stated: “if extradition was not unlawful even in the circumstances arising there, in my judgment expulsion most certainly is not unlawful here.” 66. Lord Mance, who agreed with the other Law Lords on Article 6 and all other points of appeal, noted a considerable resemblance between the concept of “flagrant unfairness” in this Court’s case-law and the concept of denial of justice in public international law generally. For the latter, the modern consensus was that the factual circumstances had to be egregious for State responsibility to arise in international law.