So, evidence obtained under torture is not admissable in British courts, that includes torture in other countries by non-British operatives.
Personally I feel it’s the right decision, since torture hasn’t been an acceptable way of getting evidence for hundreds of years and evidence obtained under torture is unreliable. The onus is now on the prosecution to prove that any evidence was gained by legitimate means.
Definitely the right decision. In and of itself it’s good. However, unless we rigorously define torture, including psychological torture, then it’s the start of a slippery slope slanting things too much in favour of the defendant. What’s to stop someone saying, “But they tortured me”? I’m confident we’ll work it out - we already have rules about duress.
Yes, because this should mean that:
a)we will not be promoting the extraction of evidence by means of torture
b)we will not be using existing evidence if it was derived by torture - such evidence is notoriously unreliable anyway.
I was entirely for this until I saw the news and saw what they were defining as torture. Simply grabbing a prisoner by his soldiers and shaking him to grab his attention is torture (the so called “attention grab”, closely related to the “attention slap”)?
I have a feeling that this is going to go the same way as the “homophobia” thread.
Torture is torture, just as prejudice is prejudice. The fact that a particular form of torture is “mild” in comparison to what the guards could do to the prisoner if they wanted doesn’t stop it being torture.
The full text (240k PDF) of the judgement explicitly states (paragraph 53, page 44) that certain techniques authorized at Guantanamo Bay do count as torture, incidentally.
Dominic Mulligan- legal definitions use a different standard than common parlance and the dictionary. The legal definition of insanity is different from both medical insanity and what the average joe in the street would consider to be “crazy”.
I don’t think slapping or grabbing people is necessary simply in order to get their attention. Clapping your hands loudly 6 inches from their face or banging a table would do the job just as well, without requiring physical contact.
I’m sure the usual no-shame posters to whom the ‘spirit of the law’ is just something to be ignored will be here soon to point out the wiggle room that makes it totally fine to torture the crap out of whoever they want though.
“Look, look - nothing in there about flying them to a country like Afghanistan and then torturing them is there! So long as we don’t turn them over to other states that might torture them. See, see! Afghan Brick Factories cannot be considered as ‘jurisdiction.’” :rolleyes:
Er, no. Saying that evidence obtained by torture should be inadmissable is easy. But, as the Law Lords themselves acknowledged (at some length), it is establishing whether evidence has actually been obtained by torture that’s the difficult bit. That’s why it was over this issue of the burden of proof that the seven Lords disagreed. But all of them recognised that expecting anyone (specifically the Home Secretary) to prove that torture had not been used would be an impossible standard. Hence the ruling by the majority that it should be decided by the balance of probabilities.
Does the judgement actually establish that? The majority opinion (Lord Hope, para 118) says:
That doesn’t exactly put the burden of proof on the defendant, but the evidence is only excluded if torture can be proved to greater than 50% probability; it’s not the case that evidence will be excluded unless torture can be disproved. The minority of the court, represented by Lord Bingham, wanted to adopt that position (with a greater standard of disproof than “balance of probabilites”), but that isn’t the final decision.
That’s not to take away anything from the importance of the case - the original contention was that the evidence was admissible even if torture was proved 100%.