Judges asked to look again at torture case

Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed have asked the High Court to reopen his case following statements from the Foreign Secretary.

As I reported here, there were major contradictions between what David Miliband appears to have told the court and what he said publicly once the judgment was published.

The Foreign Secretary told Parliament this afternoon that, in his judgment, “the disclosure of the intelligence documents at issue, by order of our courts and against the wishes of the US authorities, would indeed cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations of this country.”

Mr Miliband continued: “For the record, the United States authorities did not threaten to ‘break off’ intelligence co-operation with the UK. What the United States said — and it appears in the open, public documents of this case — is that disclosure of the documents by order of our courts would be ‘likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-sharing … between our two governments’.”

This is not a quotation from the judgment, of course, but from court papers.

Richard Stein, the solicitor at Leigh Day acting for Mohamed, said: “In court, disclosure was resisted because of US threats to downgrade the security relationship if it was disclosed. Now it is said by the Foreign Secretary to be because of a mutual understanding about how intelligence material is treated. In light of the weight given by the court to the ‘threat’, that is a substantial difference.”

Mr Stein said the Government had also failed to correct the court’s misapprehension that the Obama administration had not changed its position in relation to the threat. “In view of the fact that the matter had not been raised with the new regime this is particularly surprising.”

For those who would like to read the written submissions made today by Dinah Rose QC, I have uploaded them here.

Posted at February 5, 2009 05:34 PM