Stuart Wheeler

The Tories must say No to torture

The government is, on behalf of you and me, involved in the worst type of man’s inhumanity to man

The government is, on behalf of you and me, involved in the worst type of man’s inhumanity to man — torture. Yet with the honourable exceptions of William Hague and Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative party, the party I wholeheartedly support, the party that talks of compassionate conservatism, is failing to speak out about it when it should be shouting from the rooftops. Think of your wife or child screaming in unbearable pain, deliberately inflicted. The mere thought is enough for me to know that torture is unacceptable under any circumstances.

Yet some people need to be convinced by other arguments. There are plenty. The first is that torture does not work. General Massu, a French commander in Algeria, said, ‘Torture is not indispensable in time of war; we could have got along without it very well.’

Another crucial point: torture disgusts most people and our involvement, passive or otherwise, recruits terrorists by making us loathed. Are we really sure that 7 July had nothing to do with British torture in Iraq, or our tacit support of US abuses?  

Our legal obligations are clear. ‘No person shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ Nor may we deport people to where they might be tortured. No exceptions whatever are permitted. So that is that — or rather that should be that. Yet, as a recent report by Human Rights Watch makes clear, we have been ambivalent and worse. The following statement by our own Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, no less, beggars belief: ‘That jurisprudence says you can’t deport people where there is a serious risk of particular things happening to them — death, torture, for example… [so] we’re going to ask the European Court of Human Rights to look at that again.’

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