LONDON, 29 October 2004 — Four Britons who claim they were tortured in jails in Saudi Arabia yesterday won the right to pursue their case in Britain’s courts.
The decision will effectively remove blanket immunity in Britain’s legal system for officials from foreign states accused of serious crimes like torture.
The four men were convicted of plotting bomb attacks in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and 2001.
One of them, Ron Jones, sued Riyadh for 2.1 million pounds ($3.8 million) last year, but the High Court in London threw out the case on the grounds of Saudi Arabia’s “state immunity”.
Three senior judges at the Court of Appeal overruled that decision on appeal, and found in favor of similar appeals brought by Britons Sandy Mitchell and Les Walker and Bill Sampson, a British-Canadian who lives in England.
They struck out Jones’ claim against the Kingdom, but ruled that the men could pursue legal action against individual alleged torturers.
Mitchell, Walker and Sampson were seeking the power to sue two Saudi interrogators as well as the prison where they were held.
In a long and complex judgment, the Court of Appeal concluded: “It can no longer be appropriate to give blanket effect to a foreign state’s claim to state immunity... in respect of a state official alleged to have committed acts of systematic torture.”
Jones was kept in a Saudi detention center for 67 days following a bomb blast in which he was injured outside a bookshop in March 2001. He was released after being allowed to retract a confession he said he had made under torture.
