76 Report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights 2.2.2 Law enforcement powers The Panel was told of countries (see especially the Hearings in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan) where the intelligence services exercise powers to arrest, interrogate and detain persons, and are effectively displacing law enforcement agencies in the investigation of terrorist offences. Sometimes this practice of intelligence agencies performing law enforcement functions preceded 9/11. However, it is indubitably the case that the events of that day have exacerbated this trend. Hearings provided extensive evidence that human rights violations (torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, incommunicado detention and enforced disappearances) can all too easily flourish in the more secretive world of the intelligence agencies. At the Pakistan Hearing, for example, repeated reference was made to torture, prolonged arbitrary and incommunicado detention and disappearances allegedly committed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Panel heard directly from family members of disappeared people, and the trauma that they are living through was all too apparent. It was claimed that persons are held in unacknowledged or secret detention, that individuals have been rendered to other States (often for financial gain), and that individuals have been interrogated by foreign intelligence personnel while in incommunicado detention. The Panel heard that the ISI is operating to a large extent beyond either civilian or judicial control. As emblematic of this charge, panellists were told of financial bounties being paid out to intelligence agents to transfer persons without any legal process to US control;177 and of the utter disregard paid to court orders to produce the disappeared, or to provide information about their whereabouts. In a sharp exchange about the unaccountability of the ISI, the courts have forcefully reminded Government representatives that the latter were expected to be more than simple messengers (a “postbox”) transmitting messages between the judiciary and the intelligence services. The country’s Chief Justice was suspended178 when the state of emergency, declared in November 2007, was justified inter alia on the grounds that some members of the judiciary were “constantly interfering into executive functions, including but not limited to the control of terrorist activity that has weakened the writ of the government”.179 The Panel was told that in several countries – for example Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan – the legal basis for intelligence agents interrogating and detaining persons 177 The Panel met with a Pashtun activist who was arbitrarily detained and ill-treated and then transferred by the ISI to the US, thereby reaping for itself a financial award and ridding itself of a potentially troublesome dissident. Many participants at the Hearing also referred to President Musharraf’s book, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir by Pervez Musharraf, 2005 in which he had acknowledged transfers of terrorist suspects by Pakistan to the US in exchange for bounties. 178 The Pakistani Chief Justice was suspended immediately following the hearing of a petition about enforced disappearances; he was subsequently reinstated after the Supreme Court held that his suspension was unlawful, but again suspended following the declaration of a state of emergency in November 2007. 179 Proclamation of Emergency by President General Pervez Musharraf, 3 November 2007, para. 5 et seq.