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Ministers should explain why the UK has paid compensation to a Palestinian man who was tortured by the CIA and is still being held in Guantánamo Bay, according to a former attorney general.
Abu Zubaydah, the first man subjected to CIA waterboarding, was reported by the BBC to have been awarded a payment that may amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds because of the role of MI5 and MI6 in his mistreatment.
The Palestinian was accused of being a senior member of al-Qaida when he was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, but has never faced criminal charges. The US has dropped that accusation and he is not linked to the 9/11 attacks.
MI5 and MI6 passed on questions to the CIA to ask Zubaydah until 2006, even though MI6 was warned he was being subjected to harsh mistreatment in 2002, which lawyers argued made the British spy agencies complicit.
It was considered that “98% of US Special Forces would have been broken if subject to the same conditions”, according to a report by parliament’s intelligence and security committee published in 2018.
On Sunday the BBC reported that Zubaydah had received “substantial” compensation from the UK – a figure that lawyers not directly involved in the case estimated could amount to a six-figure sum.
But there was no explanation from the UK government beyond a simple statement from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. It said it did not comment on intelligence matters, and it is not thought to have admitted liability in making the payment. Intelligence sources also declined to comment.
Dominic Grieve, a former UK attorney general, who chaired the 2018 parliamentary inquiry into the UK spy agencies involvement in US torture and rendition during the “war on terror”, called for more clarity.
“Somebody ought to ask a parliamentary question – and the government ought to make a ministerial statement,” Grieve said. In our inquiry “we could see what had happened, but not why it happened”, he added.
The former government chief legal officer said it was “almost inevitable” that the UK would have to pay compensation and that Zubaydah was “undoubtedly a direct victim of UK negligence”.
Dan Dolan, the interim deputy executive director of Reprieve, a human rights campaign group, said the UK should clearly express regret: “If the UK government was complicit in Abu Zubaydah’s horrendous torture, they owe him a public apology, not just a cash sum.”
Dolan said that there remained a “gap in accountability” on the use of intelligence by the UK obtained from prisoners held abroad in situations were there was a real risk of torture, a practice still permitted in exceptional circumstances.
At an earlier stage of the proceedings, Zubaydah was represented by Richard Hermer, who is now the attorney general, as part of a legal battle to demonstrate that English and Welsh law applied to his case. Ultimately, the UK supreme court accepted that argument in December 2023.
A public inquiry into cases like Zubaydah’s was promised by David Cameron when he became prime minister, but was halted and replaced by a narrower investigation by parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which was not allowed to question more junior members of the agencies.
Nevertheless, in Zubaydah’s case it concluded: “The agencies [MI5 and MI6] continued to send the CIA questions to be used in interrogations without seeking any assurances regarding Zubaydah’s treatment in detention, until at least 2006.”
Court disclosures in another case, brought by Dan Jarvis, now the security minister, and Conservative MP David Davis, indicated there could be a total of 15 other cases where the spy agencies were accused of being involved.
Lawyers acting for Zubaydah, who is described as a “forever prisoner”, are engaged in a legal campaign in several countries aimed at obtaining compensation and securing his release after more than two decades in US custody.
