UCL in the News: 'Never means never'

This is territory that Sands, professor of law at University College London, has made his own. In Lawless World (Allen Lane, 2005), he explored how fundamentals of international law, established largely by the Americans and the British, were being undermined by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. …

In 2007, Sands for the prosecution and Julian Knowles for the defence interviewed a number of distinguished witnesses to test the grounds for indicting Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq. …

If Lawless World provides the big picture, Sands's gripping new book, Torture Team, is startlingly miniaturist. He set out to dissect "the process of decision-making in relation to a single piece of paper, a memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld on 2 December 2002". …

Sands sees himself primarily as an academic, but it is a role with two significant sidelines. He has a permanent though nominally half-time post at UCL, where he has an office, teaches courses, supervises doctoral students and runs the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals. He also takes three or four cases a year as a barrister at Matrix, which he helped set up in 2000. …

The "action memo" that Rumsfeld signed in December 2002 - when he was US Defence Secretary - made "legally available" a number of new and more aggressive "counter-resistance techniques". …

Rather to Sands's surprise, all the major figures agreed to see him - right up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander of Southern Command (responsible for Central and South America), the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy and even Haynes himself. Sands can only speculate as to why he was granted such unprecedented access. "I think they spoke to me because I was not American; I was not a journalist; I was a lawyer, a barrister and a QC - those three factors combined to give them a sense that I would treat them fairly, I would put the case for and against. There is a sort of code of honour among lawyers that you will treat each other respectfully." …

What helps make Torture Team so powerful is that it largely explores the crucial issues - what the military thought of the new guidelines, whether the techniques used at Guantanamo count as torture, whether Administration lawyers could face criminal charges, once out of office, if they visit certain places - through interviews with individuals. …

"In physical terms, of course, it's not worse than the mass torture that is happening today in many countries of the world. The reason that it's so important is that the US has always held itself out as doing things differently - and has done things differently. It has been a leader in developing international human rights law and international humanitarian law. If a country like the US opens the door to this type of behaviour in a formal sense, the world has changed. It's vitally significant.

"I work as a barrister for a large number of governments. I have been told by foreign ministers, I've even been told by a president, that - on the basis of the legal advice and the documents that led to the decision of December 2002 - they now see no reason why they can't do the same thing. It has opened the door to the legitimation of those types of action in foreign countries. And worse, it has made it impossible for the US to say to those countries you can't do them. So moral authority has gone, and there's no longer any difference between us and them. We have seen the price Britain and America have paid for that over the past five years. It's a big price, and it's going to take a generation to get over it." …