The federal government has directed Canada’s spy agency to use information that may have been extracted through torture in cases where public safety is at stake.

The order represents a reversal of policy for the Conservative government, which once insisted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service would discard information if there was any inkling it might be tainted.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has quietly told CSIS the government now expects the spy service to “make the protection of life and property its overriding priority.”

Afghanistan’s internal security service and police use torture and other abusive methods to extract confessions from suspected insurgents held in a number of detention centres around the country, according to a new report by the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

Interviews with 379 detainees at 47 facilities over the past year found “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” at a number of centres, the study says.

This seems to confirm what some people have been saying for many years now. The UN report is here.

Mr Mousa, a father-of-two, died two days after his arrest.

The inquiry concluded that the death was caused by a combination of his weakened physical state and a final bout of abuse.

Cpl Donald Payne had violently assaulted Mr Mousa in the minutes before he died, punching and possibly kicking him, and using a dangerous restraint method, the inquiry found.

While this was a "contributory cause" in the death, Mr Mousa had already been weakened by factors including lack of food and water, heat, exhaustion, fear, previous injuries and the hooding and stress positions used by British troops.

Sir William said Payne was a "violent bully" who inflicted a "dreadful catalogue of unjustified and brutal violence" on the detainees, also encouraging more junior soldiers to do the same.

His abuse included striking each of the detainees in turn in order to elicit cries of pain and create a "choir" effect.

Payne became the first member of the British armed forces convicted of a war crime when he admitted inhumane treatment at a court martial in 2007. He was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army.

See also Baha Mousa inquiry reveals uncomfortable truths

Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal and appropriate, but that the way Israeli forces boarded a flotilla that sailed from Turkey to try to break that blockade 15 months ago was excessive and unreasonable. Nine passengers were killed.

The report, expected to be released Friday, also found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship, they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. But the report called the force “excessive and unreasonable,” saying that the loss of life was unacceptable and that the Israeli military’s later treatment of passengers was abusive.

A copy of the report is here.

Rosie, the first judicially approved courtroom dog in New York, was in the witness box here nuzzling a 15-year-old girl who was testifying that her father had raped and impregnated her. Rosie sat by the teenager’s feet. At particularly bad moments, she leaned in.

When the trial ended in June with the father’s conviction, the teenager “was most grateful to Rosie above all,” said David A. Crenshaw, a psychologist who works with the teenager. “She just kept hugging Rosie.”

...

At least once when the teenager hesitated in Judge Greller’s courtroom, Rosie rose and seemed to push the girl gently with her nose. Mr. Tohom was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.His public defenders, David S. Martin and Steven W. Levine, have raised a series of objections that they say seem likely to land the case in New York’s highest court. They argue that as a therapy dog, Rosie responds to people under stress by comforting them, whether the stress comes from confronting a guilty defendant or lying under oath.

But they say jurors are likely to conclude that the dog is helping victims expose the truth. “Every time she stroked the dog,” Mr. Martin said in an interview, “it sent an unconscious message to the jury that she was under stress because she was telling the truth.”

“There was no way for me to cross-examine the dog,” Mr. Martin said.

A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian.

The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.

Such a policy would be impossible to square with the Convention Against Torture 1984 or, for that matter, the House of Lords' celebrated anti-torture judgment in A (FC) and others (FC) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2005] UKHL 71. At paragraph 11 of Lord Bingham's speech:

It is, I think, clear that from its very earliest days the common law of England set its face firmly against the use of torture. Its rejection of this practice was indeed hailed as a distinguishing feature of the common law, the subject of proud claims by English jurists such as Sir John Fortescue (De Laudibus Legum Angliae, c. 1460-1470, ed S.B. Chrimes, (1942), Chap 22, pp 47-53), Sir Thomas Smith (De Republica Anglorum, ed L Alston, 1906, book 2, chap 24, pp 104-107), Sir Edward Coke (Institutes of the Laws of England (1644), Part III, Chap 2, pp 34-36). Sir William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of England, (1769) vol IV, chap 25, pp 320-321), and Sir James Stephen (A History of the Criminal Law of England, 1883, vol 1, p 222). That reliance was placed on sources of doubtful validity, such as chapter 39 of Magna Carta 1215 and Felton's Case as reported by Rushworth (Rushworth's Collections, vol (i), p 638) (see D. Jardine, A Reading on the Use of Torture in the Criminal Law of England Previously to the Commonwealth, 1837, pp 10-12, 60-62) did not weaken the strength of received opinion. The English rejection of torture was also the subject of admiring comment by foreign authorities such as Beccaria (An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1764, Chap XVI) and Voltaire (Commentary on Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments, 1766, Chap XII). This rejection was contrasted with the practice prevalent in the states of continental Europe who, seeking to discharge the strict standards of proof required by the Roman-canon models they had adopted, came routinely to rely on confessions procured by the infliction of torture: see A L Lowell, "The Judicial Use of Torture" (1897) 11 Harvard L Rev 220-233, 290-300; J Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (1977); D. Hope, "Torture" [2004] 53 ICLQ 807 at pp 810-811. In rejecting the use of torture, whether applied to potential defendants or potential witnesses, the common law was moved by the cruelty of the practice as applied to those not convicted of crime, by the inherent unreliability of confessions or evidence so procured and by the belief that it degraded all those who lent themselves to the practice.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that from 1 May 2003 to 28 June 2004 the UK had jurisdiction under Article 1 (obligation to respect human rights) of the European Convention on Human Rights in respect of civilians killed during security operations carried out by UK soldiers in Basrah.

The court went on to find in Al-Skeini that there had been a failure to conduct an independent and effective investigation into the deaths of the relatives of five of the six applicants, in violation of Article 2 (right to life) of the Convention. The court awarded 17,000 euros to five of the six applicants, in addition to 50,000 euros in costs jointly.

In Al-Jedda, the court found a violation of Article 5 (1) (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention in relation to the internment of an Iraqi for more than three years (2004- 2007) in a detention centre in Basrah.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these decisions, which establishes that elements of the European Convention on Human Rights applied not just in UK military bases but also the whole of South East Iraq.

The implications of these decisions for judicial scrutiny of Canadian military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world are at once obvious and uncertain. The Supreme Court of Canada's holding in R v Hape that the Charter does not apply extra-territorially may be up for reconsideration, and even if the Charter continues to be limited in this way, Canada's human rights obligations under international law may not be. There is a risk that Hape undesirably sidelines the Charter in extra-territorial cases, leaving litigants to attempt to rely directly on Canada's treaty obligations, or at least on other domestic laws interpreted in conformity with those obligations.

Of note in Al-Skeini is a vigorour separate opinion by Judge Bonello which includes this gem (at para 37):

I confess to be quite unimpressed by the pleadings of the United Kingdom Government to the effect that exporting the European Convention on Human Rights to Iraq would have amounted to “human rights imperialism”. It ill behoves a State that imposed its military imperialism over another sovereign State without the frailest imprimatur from the international community, to resent the charge of having exported human rights imperialism to the vanquished enemy. It is like wearing with conceit your badge of international law banditry, but then recoiling in shock at being suspected of human rights promotion.

Some Europeans, it seems, have not yet got over the UK's "international law banditry" in Iraq. Good for them. In an international law system which still generally lacks strong enforcement mechanisms, derisive, mocking criticism of errant state conduct is more than sarcasm or grandstanding; it is a means by which the principles of international law are upheld and preserved.

It should not be hard to find the text of this reservation. It ought to be available on the Canada Treaty Information web site, but it is not. Nor can I find it on the DFAIT site or anywhere else. It is a very regrettable situation. Treaty-making is law-making. It ought to be transparent. Canadian citizens should be able to find out what positions their government is taking publicly in the international arena, without making a Freedom of Information Request or going to any other inconvenient lengths. 

“North Korea can no longer deny the undeniable,” said Sam Zarifi, the Asia Pacific director of Amnesty International. “For decades, the authorities have refused to admit to the existence of mass political prison camps. These are places out of sight of the rest of the world.” The report says that almost all of the human rights protections that international law has tried to set up for the past 60 years “are ignored.”

After comparing recent satellite photos of prison camps with images from 10 years ago, Mr. Zarifi said, Amnesty International became concerned that the “prison camps appear to be growing.”

The Amnesty report is here.

This, then, was the inevitable ending to the way the United States has chosen to conduct this war. Bin Laden was an enemy so dreaded and so feared that his killing by military execution was the only possible end for a country that had given up so much of itself in his name. This was not a criminal, it was judged, that our courts, even after ten years, could handle. This was not an enemy whose fate the United States wanted to debate with the world and in the world's criminal courts. His killing put an end to innumerable conversations that would, arguably, have continued to confound nations and their citizens. In his death, as in his life, we followed his lead when it came to thinking about justice.