UK Attorney General Warns US On Torture Billl [View All]

[kpete]

Attorney general warns US on torture bill

Clare Dyer
Monday September 18, 2006
The Guardian


The attorney general warned the US at the weekend that its bill to try to limit its obligations under the Geneva convention while interrogating and trying detainees risked international condemnation.

Lord Goldsmith waded into the row after a Senate committee rejected the bill and backed alternative legislation proposed by Republican senator John McCain and supported by George Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell.

The attorney general's comments, in a lecture to lawyers in Chicago, signal an attempt by Britain to bring the US back in line with international law. The bill follows a US supreme court ruling that the Geneva convention's prohibitions on torture apply to al-Qaida members, which the Bush administration had denied.

Lord Goldsmith said he had thought hard about whether to interfere in a "live, and sensitive, domestic political debate". But the issue was not purely domestic. "This is an international standard of very considerable importance and its content must be the same for all nations."

more at:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1874783,00.html