would be subjected to torture in Uzbekistan. The court said this, at
paras 71 – 73 (internal cross-reference omitted):
“71 For an issue to be raised under Article 3, it must be
established that at the time of their extradition there
existed a real risk that the applicants would be subjected in
Uzbekistan to treatment proscribed by Article 3.
72
The Court has noted the applicants’ representatives’
observations on the information in the reports of
international human-rights organisations denouncing an
administrative practice of torture and other forms of illtreatment of political dissidents, and the Uzbek régime’s
repressive policy towards such dissidents. It notes that
Amnesty International stated in its report for 2001:
‘Reports of ill-treatment and torture by law enforcement
officials of alleged supporters of banned Islamist
opposition parties and movements ... continued....’
73
However, although these findings describe the
general situation in Uzbekistan, they do not support the
specific allegations made by the applicants in the instant
case and require corroboration by other evidence.”
In fact, there was no further evidence to support the applicants’ specific
allegations. Rather, the other evidence, led on behalf of Turkey, tended
to contradict them and the Grand Chamber was unable to conclude that
substantial grounds had existed for believing that the applicants faced a
real risk of treatment proscribed by Article 3. If generalised information
about a country is not enough to establish that there is a real risk that a
given individual will be tortured there in the future, it cannot be
sufficient, either, to establish that a given statement has been extracted
there by torture in the past.
140. As my noble and learned friend, Lord Hope of Craighead, has
explained, the Hanseatic Oberlandesgericht in Hamburg adopted a
somewhat similar approach in El Motassadeq NJW 2005, 2326. There
the court was considering whether article 15 of the Convention against
Torture prevented it from using summaries of certain witness statements
supplied by the United States. Apparently, the witnesses were members
of Al Qa’eda, and the suggestion was that the statements had been
obtained by torture. The court asked the German government for
information, but the relevant government departments were unable to
provide any information from the competent American authorities since
it had been supplied to them for intelligence purposes only. In that
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