OTHMAN (ABU QATADA) v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 43 135. In re El Motassadeq, before the Hamburg Court of Appeal Criminal Division (Oberlandesgericht), the defendant was charged with conspiracy to cause the attacks of 11 September 2011. The court was provided with summaries of statements of three witnesses who had been held and questioned in US custody. Requests as the nature to the United States authorities’ questioning had been met with no response. The court based its assessment as to whether torture had been used on available, publicly accessible sources. The court found that, on the whole, it had not been proved that the witnesses had been tortured, inter alia because the content of the statements was not one-sided. This meant the court decided not to consider Article 15 of UNCAT, which, it observed, would have justified a prohibition on using the evidence (see the summary of the judgment in A and others (no. 2), §§ 60, 122 and 123, 140 and 141). The defendant’s subsequent application to this Court was declared inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded: El Motassadeq v. Germany (dec.) no. 28599/07, 4 May 2010. C. The United Kingdom 1. A and others (no. 2) 136. In A and others (no. 2) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] UKHL 41 the House of Lords considered whether SIAC could lawfully admit evidence which had or may have been obtained by torture in another State without the complicity of British officials. On the basis of the common law, the case-law of this Court, and public international law, including UNCAT, their Lordships concluded that it could not. 137. Their Lordships were divided as to the appropriate test which SIAC should apply in determining whether evidence should be admitted. All of their Lordships agreed that a conventional approach to the burden of proof was not appropriate given the nature of SIAC procedures. An appellant in a SIAC appeal could not be expected to do more than raise a plausible reason that evidence might have been obtained by torture. Where he did so, it was for SIAC to initiate relevant inquiries. The majority (Lords Hope, Rodger, Carswell and Brown) then went on to find that SIAC should adopt the test of admissibility laid down in Article 15 of UNCAT. They held that SIAC should thus consider whether it was established on the balance of probabilities that the evidence was obtained by torture. If so satisfied, SIAC should not admit the evidence but, if it were doubtful, it should admit the evidence, bearing its doubt in mind when evaluating it. By contrast, Lords Bingham, Nicholls and Hoffmann found that a balance of probabilities test could never be satisfied and would undermine the practical efficacy of UNCAT. They proposed a lower test, namely that where SIAC concluded