a source of national pride and the admiration of enlightened foreign writers such as Voltaire and Beccaria. In our own century, many people in the United States, heirs to that common law tradition, have felt their country dishonoured by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction and its practice of extra-legal “rendition” of suspects to countries where they would be tortured: see Jeremy Waldron, Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House 105 Columbia Law Review 16811750 (October, 2005) 83. Just as the writ of habeas corpus is not only a special (and nowadays infrequent) remedy for challenging unlawful detention but also carries a symbolic significance as a touchstone of English liberty which influences the rest of our law, so the rejection of torture by the common law has a special iconic importance as the touchstone of a humane and civilised legal system. Not only that: the abolition of torture, which was used by the state in Elizabethan and Jacobean times to obtain evidence admitted in trials before the court of Star Chamber, was achieved as part of the great constitutional struggle and civil war which made the government subject to the law. Its rejection has a constitutional resonance for the English people which cannot be overestimated. 84. During the last century the idea of torture as a state instrument of special horror came to be accepted all over the world, as is witnessed by the international law materials collected by my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill. Among the many unlawful practices of state officials, torture and genocide are regarded with particular revulsion: crimes against international law which every state is obliged to punish wherever they may have been committed. 85. It is against that background that one must examine the Secretary of State’s submission that statements obtained abroad by torture are admissible in appeals to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (“SIAC”) under section 25 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001. First, he says that there is no authority to the contrary. He accepts that the common law has long held that confessions obtained by torture are inadmissible against an accused person. Indeed, the common law went a good deal further and by the end of the eighteenth century was refusing to admit confessions which had been obtained by threats or promises of any kind. But nothing was said about statements obtained from third parties. The general rule is that any relevant evidence is admissible. As Lord Goddard said in Kuruma v The Queen [1955] AC 197, 203, “the court is not concerned with how the evidence was -53-