THE Foreign Office’s report into human rights abuses in Iraq fails to advance substantially what is already known about the tactics employed by the regime in Baghdad to stay in power.

Saddam Hussein: crimes and human rights abuses was meant to strengthen the case against the Iraqi regime, which was accused of concealing weapons of mass destruction in another dossier released by the Government in September.

It is clear from reading the latest report, however, that receiving accurate and timely information from inside Iraq is a serious problem for the Foreign Office, which closed its Embassy in Baghdad in 1990, before the Gulf War.

Eyewitness accounts of abuses are drawn mainly from second-hand sources, published remarks by journalists and human rights activists, who have interviewed the victims in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq or after they have fled the country. Many of those concerned are connected with the opposition, or have recounted their stories to groups linked to it.

In the past the British Government has questioned the credibility of the opposition. Its claims are impossible to verify, because Iraq denies that abuses take place and refuses access to prisons and secret police offices.

A greater effort could have been made to interview victims at first hand and to check out their stories. For example, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, recounted yesterday how Scott Ritter, a former American United Nations weapons inspector, had visited a prison for children of enemies of the regime, where the oldest inmate was 12 and the youngest a toddler. This chilling first-hand account, by a man known to be sympathetic to Baghdad, could have a made a valuable contribution to the other testimonies.

Documentary evidence is also problematic. All the documents published in the report are more than a decade old and many appear to be the same well-circulated government papers that were captured in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The videos present shocking footage of prisoners being beaten and executed. But it is not clear when and where the footage was taken, nor the identity of the Iraqis involved.

The report also ignores the changes taking place in Iraq today. In October this year the Iraqi authorities released 10,000 prisoners, most of them criminals, in a general amnesty. Saddam has also invited some opposition figures back into the country to discuss allowing groups other than the Baath Party to run Iraq.

In making its public allegations against Iraq, the British Government should keep in mind its experiences in the Balkans. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serb leader, was compared to Pol Pot and Hitler and accused of mass murder and genocide. But as he stands trial now in The Hague facing those charges, the case against him is proving hard to make.

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