ISLAMIST terrorist suspects have been interned without trial in Britain on the basis of evidence extracted by torturing detainees at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, the Court of Appeal was told yesterday.

The use of such methods is morally repugnant in the English legal system, claimed lawyers for ten Muslim men held under emergency powers introduced after the September 11 atrocities.

Yet British government officials had been present during some of the interrogations of inmates at the US detention centre in Cuba.

The foreign terrorist suspects, most of whom are held at Belmarsh prison in southeast London, are contesting rulings by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that their detention is lawful.

The SIAC has held that it is entitled to consider evidence which may have been obtained under torture or ill-treatment at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, or other US detention facilities.

Ben Emmerson, QC, representing eight of the detainees, said that he was seeking to break new legal ground by establishing the principle that evidence gathered by torture should be excluded from English courts.

“It is an affront to the public conscience for the State to rely in judicial proceedings on evidence obtained by torture,” Mr Emmerson said. “In a society governed by the rule of law, the courts will not lend their authority to permit a party to rely on such evidence.

“The origin of the principle we seek lies not in the concern solely about the reliability of such evidence, but in the standards common to democratic societies which set their face against torture.”

Mr Emmerson said that it did not matter whether the alleged torture was carried out by the State or by agents of another state. “The underlying rationale is based on repugnance of the means used to procure the evidence.”

Mr Emmerson said that by allowing evidence obtained through torture, the SIAC was breaking common law and was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention Against Torture. Mr Emmerson argued that while much evidence presented to the SIAC was “closed”, there was sufficient public material to support the assumption that torture was occurring at US camps.

At Bagram and Guantanamo Bay interrogators used “stress and duress” techniques, including making men kneel for hours with hoods on their heads or spray-painted goggles over their eyes. Other inmates had suffered sleep deprivation and beatings. The US military had announced inquiries into the deaths of two inmates at Bagram who died of “blunt-force injuries”.

A former inmate of Guantanamo Bay had spoken of “sleep deprivation and kneeling punishments and threats to our families”. He said that al-Qaeda suspects had been shot at with dummy rounds.

Other suspects were said to have been taken to Egypt, Jordan and Morocco for torture by the regimes there under CIA supervision. Mr Emmerson told the three appeal court judges: “There is no question that British officials were present in Guantanamo Bay during some of the interrogations that took place. That is a fact.”

He said the Home Secretary’s approach to such evidence was to consider only its reliability, not whether it was legally obtained or admissible.

Mr Emmerson is also challenging the detention of the detainees on the grounds that the SIAC has given insufficient scrutiny to their designation as terrorists, that it erred in deciding “a remote link to al-Qaeda” provided enough evidence to detain someone and that the standard of proof relied on was insufficient.

Two detainees who exercised their option to leave Britain, Jamal Ajouaou and a man referred to as “F”, are claiming that the SIAC did not have jurisdiction to consider their appeal against certification as terrorists because they had left the country.

The judges hearing the appeal, Lord Justice Pill, Lord Justice Laws and Lord Justice Neuberger, indicated that they would reserve judgment at the conclusion of the five-day hearing.

LAYING DOWN THE LAW ON DEGRADING TREATMENT

The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 1984:

Article 1 defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . . when such pain or suffering is inflicted by, or at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity”.

Article 15 states: “Each state party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except as against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.”

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