Human Rights and where Labour went wrong

If you want to understand some of the reasons why Labour lost the last election then take a look at the headlines in today’s “Morning Star”. Now this is not a newspaper with a large circulation and frequently its editorials have been at odds with the broad general consensus. However, on this occasion the issue they raise habe been followed up in many of the broadsheets (I think we can safely dismiss the red-tops as only being useful to keep your chips warm).

Baha Musa was a 26-year old hotel receptionist living in Iraq ad who was arrested by soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. During their ‘interview, Mr Musa suffered a total of 93 injuries whilst being held at the UK operated detention centre in Basra.

Sadly this case was not unusual – a further nine complaints were received of abuse of prisoners by British forces at the Majar-al-Kabir base near al-Amarah and four soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were found guilty of abusing looters. In the case of Baha Musa, one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating prisoners, but was acquitted of manslaughter – he was dismissed from the army.

Now we hear news that Adam Ingram, the former minister responsible for the armed forces between 2001 - 2007, misled parliament by denying British forces hooded detainees as an interrogation technique. In a written response to a question in the house, he said: “The UK believes that this is acceptable under Geneva Conventions but I should make absolutely clear that hooding was only used during the transit of prisoners. It was not used as an interrogation technique”.

Regrettably, breaches of the human rights of terrorists captured by UK forces are not uncommon. Take the case of Liam Holden, the last person in the UK who was sentenced to be hanged, who insisted that he made the confession only because he had been held down by members of the Parachute Regiment, whom he says placed a towel over his face before pouring water from a bucket over his nose and mouth, giving him the impression that he was drowning. Holden, a Roman Catholic, was 19 and employed as a chef when he was detained while at his parents home in the Ballymurphy area of west Belfast in October 1972 during a raid by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. Apparently acting on a tipoff from an informer, the soldiers accused Holden of being the sniper who, a month earlier, had shot dead Private Frank Bell of the regiment's 2nd Battalion. Bell had just turned 18 and had joined the regiment six weeks earlier. He was the 100th British soldier to die in Northern Ireland that year.

When Holden came to trial in April 1973 he told the jury he had been playing cards with his brother and two friends in a public place at the time Bell was shot. He said that after being arrested in his bed the soldiers had taken him to their base on Black Mountain, west of Belfast, where he was beaten, burned with a cigarette lighter, hooded and threatened with execution.

The Labour party has always tried to portray itself as the party of the underdog, the weak and the oppressed – yet repeatedly there have been cases reported where suspects held by UK authorities have suffered serious infringements of their basic human rights. This was, and always will be totally unacceptable and should have never happened. In the latter years of government, the leadership under Blair, and later Brown became complacent and complicit in barbaric acts against suspects.

More disturbingly, one of the current leadership candidates withheld information from parliament and the people because of fears that if he did so “it would have violated an intelligence-sharing agreement with the United States”. I am, of course, referring to the Binyam Mohamed case where David Miliband held back information about the interrogation procedure – Mr Mohamed later revealed that British spies interviewed him during the time he alleges he was having his chest and penis cut with a scalpel and stinging liquid poured into the wounds, and that they passed on detailed personal information about him to his torturers.

Hardly the kind of actions one would expect from a potential leader of the Labour party and certainly not the behaviour of someone now wishing to portray himself as all-listening and all-caring.

We can only hope the party membership sees through the spin and glitz and recognises him for what he is – another example of New Labour revisionism with no apparent passion for human rights or civil liberties. If we fail, we risk having a leader who not only ignores the lessons from the past, but perpetuates the errors in the future.