Torture chamber at the Ba-ath party headquarters at Basra, Iraq, abandoned after the coalition's siege of the city. PA/EMPICS

Torture has a long history in Britain, with examples ranging from the medieval 'trial by ordeal' to the interrogation of witches and heretics in the 17th century. The British state has also been responsible for widespread torture and brutality beyond its shores – including, notoriously, in 19th-century Jamaica and Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

But alongside this grim history, there has been a long and increasingly successful series of attempts to regulate and abolish torture, dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215 through to the Bill of Rights in 1689 and the Human Rights Act of 1998. Until recently, it might have seemed that torture had become a thing of the past.

The War on Terror destroyed that comfortable assumption. It replaced it with the uneasy suspicion that, in some circumstances, torture might be the only way of preventing a terrorist atrocity. In Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, the US and UK have already been implicated in practices that might be described as torture.

These developments pose some uncomfortable questions. Are we in danger of allowing torture to become acceptable again? Does torture even produce reliable evidence, or is it being used to break suspected terrorists? Most fundamentally, does anything justify the use of torture?

Top