SHARING INFORMATION WITH STATES THAT TORTURE Ahmed & Anor v R [2011] EWCA Crim 184 Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen, was jailed in 2008 for being a member of Al Qaeda and planning mass murder. During the trial, Ahmed claimed he had been tortured whilst he was in custody in Pakistan. He said that after being detained by the Pakistani intelligence agency in August 2006, he was beaten with sticks, whipped with electric cables, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep, and had his fingernails removed with pliers. He also claimed that British agents had visited him and interviewed him on the first day of his detention, and their involvement may have even been to ‘suggest’ the Pakistani authorities detain him in the first place. One of the important questions directed to the Court was whether it would be an abuse of process to allow the trial of a person detained and tortured with the apparent connivance of the British. The Court considered that the prosecutor had not relied on any of the information obtained by torture while he was detained in Pakistan, and consequently should not stay proceedings against the accused simply because they were broadly associated with torture. The Court then went on to consider the complicity of the actions of British agents in the torture at the hands of the Pakistani agencies. Ahmed alleged the British were complicit because the relationship between them was such that they had encouraged or otherwise consented to his treatment. Yet the Court rejected the arguments, accepting the view of the Trial Chamber, that stated: “As a general principle, in order to protect the lives of its citizens, the UK may exchange information with countries whose record on human rights we may rightly or wrongly regard as inferior to ours.” Critics, such as Sarah Fulton, have condemned the ruling for its apparent inconsistency with the explicit obligations of the UN Convention against Torture, to which the United Kingdom has pledged itself to uphold, as well as reports of the Special Rapporteur on torture and the UK Joint Commission on Human Rights.10 10 See S. Fulton, ‘Cooperating with the enemy of mankind: Can States simply turn a blind eye to torture?’, IJHR, 16:5, 773–795. 11