my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill and there is nothing in it with which I would wish to disagree. LORD HOPE OF CRAIGHEAD My Lords, 100. I have had the advantage of reading in draft the speech of my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill. His account of the background to this case is so complete that I hesitate to say anything that might detract from it. But it is one thing to condemn torture, as we all do. It is another to find a solution to the question that this case raises which occupies the moral high ground but at the same time serves the public interest and is practicable. Condemnation is easy. Finding a solution to the question is much more difficult. It requires much more thought. So it is on that aspect of the case in particular, after looking at the history, that I should like to concentrate. Background 101. Torture, one of most evil practices known to man, is resorted to for a variety of purposes and it may help to identify them to put this case into its historical context. The lesson of history is that, when the law is not there to keep watch over it, the practice is always at risk of being resorted to in one form or another by the executive branch of government. The temptation to use it in times of emergency will be controlled by the law wherever the rule of law is allowed to operate. But where the rule of law is absent, or is reduced to a mere form of words to which those in authority pay no more than lip service, the temptation to use torture is unrestrained. The probability of its use will rise or fall according the scale of the perceived emergency. 102. In the first place, torture may be used on a large scale as an instrument of blatant repression by totalitarian governments. That is what was alleged in R v Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, Ex p Pinochet Ugarte (No 3) [2000] 1 AC 147, where the picture presented by the draft charges against Senator Pinochet which had been prepared by the Spanish judicial authorities was of a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy of the most evil kind – to commit -59-