UK: Egyptian national “unlawfully detained” after intervention by Prime Minister
01 August 2004
"We should use whatever assurances the Egyptians are willing to offer, to build a case to initiate the deportation procedure”
Tony Blair’s office
In July 2004, Mr Youssef, an Egyptian national, won his High Court case against the government for false imprisonment after Justice Field ruled that the final two weeks of his near ten-month detention, between 1998 and 1999, were unlawful. Of particular interest, in this case, are the Prime Minister's frequent interventions against the advice of his Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and officials. As documentation cited in the judgement shows, Youssef remained in detention along with three other Egyptian nationals, after 3 June 1999, largely because of the Prime Minister's intransigence regarding the legal requirements of the case. Furthermore, the case serves to demonstrate the role of political considerations in handling cases sensitive to bilateral relations between two countries, arguably at the cost of the detainee.
The power to detain is predicated on the ability to deport, but to do so the government would need to fulfil its responsibility of ensuring that the Article 3 rights (of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights) of the defendants would not be breached. Thus they would either have to be removed to a safe third country or assurances would be required from the Egyptian government that Youssef would not face torture or other human rights violations should he be returned. Moreover, these assurances would need to satisfy a court both of their validity and comprehensiveness. This was never likely to be an easy task in the face of a damning Amnesty International Country Report and a UN Committee Against Torture report, from May 1996, which claimed "that torture is systematically practised by the security forces in Egypt" and argued "the Government should make particular efforts to prevent its security forces from acting as a State within a State, for they seem to escape control by superior authorities".
The detention of the four men was justified only whilst there existed a legitimate chance of either one of these eventualities taking place, but arguably, by 3 June, there was not. The Home Secretary, clearly aware of the now precarious legal basis for their detention, was ready to release the four men and accordingly asked the Prime Minister for a decision within 48 hours as to whether he wished to pursue the matter personally with the Egyptian President. Blair's response, coming 11 days later, "must have come as a considerable shock to both the Home Office and the FCO" (Foreign & Commonwealth Office) according to the judge. Blair intended to replace a carefully constructed package of assurances designed to fully guarantee the upholding of Article 3 with a single "no torture" assurance. Moreover, Article 3 itself is non divisible. A "no torture" assurance is incapable of also covering the "inhuman or degrading treatment" aspect. Within 48 hours, two negative letters from the FCO had undermined the proposal but it still took almost a month for the detainees to be released.
What the judge termed an "entirely new strategy" was also entirely unworkable. Not only would a single assurance never have a chance of satisfying a court, but the Egyptians had already indicated that the idea of a written assurance itself was objectionable. Just like his proposal to take the matter up personally with the President of Egypt, Blair failed to acknowledge that not only had the issue of assurances already been considered at the highest level by officials in the Home Office and Foreign Office, but their reluctance to support his idea stemmed from the potential for humiliation should the case go to court - a likely rejection, should they proceed with the one assurance, on the basis of Egypt's human rights record, would be embarrassing. Moreover, even had they provided all of the original assurances there was still no guarantee a British court would be satisfied of t