BEWARE THE GIFT OF POISON FRUIT providing other support short of actual participation constitutes ‘aid or assistance’. The ILC Commentary suggests that an act must be intended to contribute significantly to the wrongful act, and while many active actions of executive agencies would certainly qualify, it remains unclear whether the forms of passive support (such as irregular receipt and use) would qualify. Art.16 of the ILC Draft Articles also requires that the State must know of the circumstances of the illegality. In many cases of State cooperation, torture is so widespread, documented, and pervasive that no amount of wilful blindness on the part of the executive agency could avoid actual knowledge of the illegality required for State responsibility. Nevertheless, this additional hurdle is likely to present further difficulties for a finding of responsibility under this ILC article. Where there are serious breaches, gross or systematic violations of peremptory norms of international law, such as the prohibition against torture, the special regime of rules described in Draft Article 41 comes into effect. Breaches of such rules immediately attach additional consequences, not only for the responsible State, but for all other States. All States must cooperate to bring an end to the breach and not recognise it as lawful, nor render aid or assistance to maintain the situation. These Draft Articles require that if a State is known to systematically torture detainees, no State may recognise that information it receives from the agencies was lawfully obtained. Were such a conclusion to be widely accepted, it would have potentially significant consequences for joint police investigations and for INTERPOL, which routinely relies on information from States which may have been obtained under conditions amounting to torture. However, the exact scope of Draft Article 41 is not widely agreed. As a result, until further elaboration of the rule offers guidance to States, it remains an unsettled emerging rule of international law. While it remains unclear exactly how Draft Article 41 should be understood in the context of the executive use of information, we might tentatively recognise that by maintaining an active and ongoing information-sharing relationship with States that systematically torture, States serve to maintain the situation of illegality, contrary 26