Comments
On January 17, 2017, the U.K. Supreme Court issued three rulings touching on various allegations of wrongful acts committed by the U.K. when fighting international terrorism in the joined cases: Belhaj v. Straw and Rahmatullah (No 1) v. Ministry of Defence (collectively Rahmatullah 1); Rahmatullah (No 2) v. Ministry of Defence and Mohammed v. Ministry of Defence (collectively Rahmatullah 2); and Abd Ali Hameed Al-Waheed v. Ministry of Defence and Serdar Mohammed v. Ministry of Defence (collectively Al-Waheed). According to the press release, Rahmatullah 1 addressed a claim against the U.K. for its alleged complicity in torture overseas and the Court ruled that the claim was not barred by rules of state immunity and the foreign act of state doctrine. According to the press release for Rahmatullah 2, the Court ruled that the tort claims of the respondents—who alleged that they were wrongfully detained or mistreated by the U.K. or U.S. in Afghanistan or Iraq—were unsustainable as the action at issue was inherently governmental as Crown acts of state, which cannot give raise to tort liability. The Al-Waheed press release states that the Court ruled “British forces had power to take and detain prisoners for periods exceeding 96 hours if this was necessary for imperative reasons of security.” The Court added, however, that the government’s “procedures for doing so did not comply with [the European Convention on Human Rights] article 5(4) because they did not afford prisoners an effective right to challenge their detention.”