Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill today spoke with United States Attorney General Eric Holder as part of the ongoing consideration of the application for the prisoner transfer for Mr Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.
As part of the process of consideration of the application, Mr MacAskill has already made clear that he would meet groups and individuals who have submitted relevant representations to the Scottish Government and listen to their views.
In addition to today's discussions with Mr Holder, Mr MacAskill will also be listening to the views of representatives of family members of victims from the UK and US as well as the Libyan Government.
Mr MacAskill said:
"As part of my thorough consideration of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement submitted by the Libyan Government on behalf of Mr Al Megrahi, I want to ensure I have all the relevant information available to me before reaching decisions.
"Hearing these representations is a key part of that process.
"As I have said before, any decision will be made on judicial grounds alone. Economic and political considerations have no place in the process."
The Prisoner Transfer Agreement was signed on November 17 2008 and following scrutiny by the Joint Committee of Human Rights at Westminster, was ratified by the UK and Libyan Governments.
Scottish Ministers are now bound by this Agreement and required to consider transfer applications made under it.
The Scottish Government received an application from the Libyan Government in respect of Mr Al Megrahi on May 5, 2009.
The application is now being determined on its merits in line with the Agreement and relevant legislation by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice who will take all relevant considerations into account.
The Prisoner Transfer Agreement states that the decision should normally be given within 90 days of being received although it could be longer if further information is required in relation to the application or for any other reason.
[This is the text of a news release issued today by the Scottish Government. The Sun's report on the topic can be read here, and The Scotsman's here.]
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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query "prisoner transfer agreement". Sort by date Show all posts
Friday 26 June 2009
Saturday 18 April 2009
Megrahi may return to Libya, Lockerbie families told
This is the heading over an article by Lucy Adams in today's edition of The Herald. It reads in part:
'Senior legal officials, in a tacit acknowledgement that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is likely to be allowed to return home, have written to all relatives of the victims explaining the transfer process.
'After years of denial by ministers and officials, the Crown Office e-mail suggests that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, currently serving 27 years in Greenock Prison for the bombing that killed 270 people, will be allowed to return to Libya under a transfer agreement to be ratified before the end of this month.
'The e-mail also suggests that ratification may take place on April 27, the day before Megrahi's long-awaited appeal begins in Edinburgh.
'Earlier this year, The Herald revealed that Libyan officials had been encouraged by senior civil servants from both sides of the border, including Robert Gordon, the head of the Justice Department in Scotland, to apply for Megrahi to be transferred as soon as the agreement is ratified. (...)
'Yesterday's revelation coincided with the publication of a critical report on the transfer agreement by the Joint Committee on Human Rights at Westminster.
'The report makes apparent the committee's disdain of Jack Straw, the UK Justice Secretary, for failing to delay ratification to allow for proper scrutiny.
'Mr Straw wrote to the committee in March to say he would delay ratification only until the Easter recess because "a delay beyond early April is likely to lead to serious questions on the part of Libya in regards to our willingness to conclude this and three other judicial co-operation agreements".'
The full article can be read here.
An accompanying piece headlined ‘The relatives of the victims also have human rights’, also by Lucy Adams, contains the following:
'Little has been allowed to get in the way of plans to return the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing back to his home country since the global political axis turned. (...)
'Talks to establish a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between Libya and the UK began in 2005, but the Foreign Office has consistently denied that such discussions bear any relevance to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.
'The agreement, signed by Westminster and due to be ratified by the end of the month, means that any Libyan serving a sentence in the UK, who has no pending appeal, could be returned home. Those in Scottish prisons could be moved only with the permission of Scottish ministers.
'But the wheels are turning in spite of concerns and opposition. While the appeal itself has taken years to begin, the machinery behind the transfer agreement is moving with haste.
'Westminster's Joint Committee on Human Rights publicly stated last month that the treaty raises concerns and requested that ratification be delayed until the end of April so that it could publish a substantive report.
'However, Jack Straw, the UK Justice Secretary, said he would delay ratification only until the Easter recess because "a delay beyond early April is likely to lead to serious questions on the part of Libya".
'The committee report states: "In our view, when a select committee states that it intends to scrutinise a treaty, ratification should be delayed until the committee's inquiry has concluded."
'Despite the pleas of relatives of the victims of the tragedy and Scottish ministers demanding that Megrahi be exempt from the agreement, it appears from both the Crown Office e-mail and official sources that he may be the first prisoner to be dealt with.
'First Minister Alex Salmond made clear in April 2008 that Megrahi would serve his full sentence in Scotland and that he would "defend the integrity of the Scottish judicial system". However, officials have privately made clear to the Libyans that they are prepared to go back on such claims, which were allegedly "made more in relation to the murky politics of the deal in the desert than Megrahi". (...)
'Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died in the tragedy, said: "Jack Straw has overridden the wishes of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and refused to delay ratification in order to ensure it can be active by April 27 - the day before the appeal starts.
"For those who think the Scottish legal process is nothing more than a political pantomime, here's the confirmation. The whole thing has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with convenience and financial gain.
'"The relatives also have human rights, including the right to know what happened to a loved one and why they were not better protected."
'A Scottish Government spokeswoman said last night: "The PTA was negotiated and signed by the UK and Libyan Governments and so is it is a matter for those governments. Once ratified, it will be for the Scottish ministers to decide on any application for prisoner transfer in relation to all prisoners in Scotland.
'"We do not discuss hypothetical applications and will not prejudge any decision."
'A Crown Office spokeswoman said: "Since the day the UK signed the agreement, we have communicated with the families because of their interest in any prisoner transfer arrangements between the UK and Libya."'
The full text of the article can be read here, and a short piece entitled Dialogue and denial on the way to a deal, which contains a catalogue of governmental prevarication and obfuscation on the prisoner transfer issue, can be read here.
'Senior legal officials, in a tacit acknowledgement that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is likely to be allowed to return home, have written to all relatives of the victims explaining the transfer process.
'After years of denial by ministers and officials, the Crown Office e-mail suggests that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, currently serving 27 years in Greenock Prison for the bombing that killed 270 people, will be allowed to return to Libya under a transfer agreement to be ratified before the end of this month.
'The e-mail also suggests that ratification may take place on April 27, the day before Megrahi's long-awaited appeal begins in Edinburgh.
'Earlier this year, The Herald revealed that Libyan officials had been encouraged by senior civil servants from both sides of the border, including Robert Gordon, the head of the Justice Department in Scotland, to apply for Megrahi to be transferred as soon as the agreement is ratified. (...)
'Yesterday's revelation coincided with the publication of a critical report on the transfer agreement by the Joint Committee on Human Rights at Westminster.
'The report makes apparent the committee's disdain of Jack Straw, the UK Justice Secretary, for failing to delay ratification to allow for proper scrutiny.
'Mr Straw wrote to the committee in March to say he would delay ratification only until the Easter recess because "a delay beyond early April is likely to lead to serious questions on the part of Libya in regards to our willingness to conclude this and three other judicial co-operation agreements".'
The full article can be read here.
An accompanying piece headlined ‘The relatives of the victims also have human rights’, also by Lucy Adams, contains the following:
'Little has been allowed to get in the way of plans to return the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing back to his home country since the global political axis turned. (...)
'Talks to establish a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between Libya and the UK began in 2005, but the Foreign Office has consistently denied that such discussions bear any relevance to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.
'The agreement, signed by Westminster and due to be ratified by the end of the month, means that any Libyan serving a sentence in the UK, who has no pending appeal, could be returned home. Those in Scottish prisons could be moved only with the permission of Scottish ministers.
'But the wheels are turning in spite of concerns and opposition. While the appeal itself has taken years to begin, the machinery behind the transfer agreement is moving with haste.
'Westminster's Joint Committee on Human Rights publicly stated last month that the treaty raises concerns and requested that ratification be delayed until the end of April so that it could publish a substantive report.
'However, Jack Straw, the UK Justice Secretary, said he would delay ratification only until the Easter recess because "a delay beyond early April is likely to lead to serious questions on the part of Libya".
'The committee report states: "In our view, when a select committee states that it intends to scrutinise a treaty, ratification should be delayed until the committee's inquiry has concluded."
'Despite the pleas of relatives of the victims of the tragedy and Scottish ministers demanding that Megrahi be exempt from the agreement, it appears from both the Crown Office e-mail and official sources that he may be the first prisoner to be dealt with.
'First Minister Alex Salmond made clear in April 2008 that Megrahi would serve his full sentence in Scotland and that he would "defend the integrity of the Scottish judicial system". However, officials have privately made clear to the Libyans that they are prepared to go back on such claims, which were allegedly "made more in relation to the murky politics of the deal in the desert than Megrahi". (...)
'Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died in the tragedy, said: "Jack Straw has overridden the wishes of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and refused to delay ratification in order to ensure it can be active by April 27 - the day before the appeal starts.
"For those who think the Scottish legal process is nothing more than a political pantomime, here's the confirmation. The whole thing has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with convenience and financial gain.
'"The relatives also have human rights, including the right to know what happened to a loved one and why they were not better protected."
'A Scottish Government spokeswoman said last night: "The PTA was negotiated and signed by the UK and Libyan Governments and so is it is a matter for those governments. Once ratified, it will be for the Scottish ministers to decide on any application for prisoner transfer in relation to all prisoners in Scotland.
'"We do not discuss hypothetical applications and will not prejudge any decision."
'A Crown Office spokeswoman said: "Since the day the UK signed the agreement, we have communicated with the families because of their interest in any prisoner transfer arrangements between the UK and Libya."'
The full text of the article can be read here, and a short piece entitled Dialogue and denial on the way to a deal, which contains a catalogue of governmental prevarication and obfuscation on the prisoner transfer issue, can be read here.
Thursday 8 June 2017
The prisoner transfer débâcle
Scotland's justice secretary today labelled as "ludicrous" Westminster's claim that a prisoner exchange agreement with Libya did not cover the Lockerbie bomber.
Kenny MacAskill poured scorn on Downing Street's insistence that a memorandum of understanding signed last week during a trip by Tony Blair to Libya did not apply to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.
Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, has protested to Tony Blair over the agreement, which he suggested could lead to the Lockerbie bomber being transferred from Scotland to his homeland.
The SNP leader made an emergency statement in the Holyrood parliament complaining that "at no stage" had he been made aware of a British-Libyan agreement on extradition and prisoner release before it was signed.
The agreement has sparked the first major row between the government and the minority SNP administration in Holyrood.
Mr MacAskill told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland that Westminster's handling of the affair was "at minimum, discourteous to the first minister and the Scottish parliament".
Mr MacAskill continued: "There's no mention of al-Megrahi [in the memorandum] but we have many people in our prisons ... but we have only one Libyan national in our prisons.
"So when we're talking about the transfer of Libyan prisoners they are not secreted in Barlinnie, Saughton, Perth or anywhere else.
"We have only one Libyan national in custody and when we talk about the transfer of prisoners, frankly it is ludicrous to suggest that we are talking in a context other than this major atrocity that was perpetrated on Scottish soil and which was dealt with by a Scottish court and with a sentence provided by Scottish judges." (...)
No 10 denied Megrahi's case was covered by the document, saying: "There is a legal process currently under way in Scotland reviewing this case which is not expected to conclude until later this summer.
"Given that, it is totally wrong to suggest the we have reached any agreement with the Libyan government in this case.
"The memorandum of understanding agreed with the Libyan government last week does not cover this case."
But Mr MacAskill rejected any suggestion that the agreement would only apply to the transfer of al-Qaida suspects.
He said: "We haven't been given clarification [by Downing Street].
"All we've been told is that a memorandum of understanding has been signed.
"Mr al-Megrahi is not specifically excluded. It refers to the transfer of prisoners so this is London's interpretation of it.
"I doubt it very much if it's the interpretation being placed upon it by the government of Libya."
The row comes in the middle of an examination of Megrahi's case by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The body will decide later this month whether to refer his conviction back to an appeal court.
Mr MacAskill said: "It [the memorandum] is undermining the fabric of the Scottish judicial system that has been independent long before the Scottish parliament was established.
David Mundell, the Tory MP whose Dumfriesshire constituency covers Lockerbie, said he was "appalled" by Mr Blair's handling of the matter.
"Not only has he ridden roughshod over Scotland's parliament and legal system, but his actions threaten to undermine a legal process which took years to put in place and was agreed with the United Nations and international community," he said.
It was on [29 May] 2007 that the “deal in the desert” was concluded between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi at a meeting in Sirte. This was embodied in a “memorandum of understanding” that provided, amongst other things, for a prisoner transfer agreement to be drawn up. In later years UK Government ministers, particularly Justice Secretary Jack Straw, sought to argue either (i) that the prisoner transfer element of the deal was not intended to apply to Abdelbaset Megrahi or (ii) that if it was intended to cover him, all parties appreciated that the decision on transfer would be one for the Scottish Government not the UK Government. Here is what I wrote about that on this blog:
According to Jack Straw "the Libyans understood that the discretion in respect of any PTA application rested with the Scottish Executive." This is not so. In meetings that I had with Libyan officials at the highest level shortly after the "deal in the desert" it was abundantly clear that the Libyans believed that the UK Government could order the transfer of Mr Megrahi and that they were prepared to do so. When I told them that the relevant powers rested with the Scottish -- not the UK -- Government, they simply did not believe me. When they eventually realised that I had been correct, their anger and disgust with the UK Government was palpable. As I have said elsewhere:
"The memorandum of understanding regarding prisoner transfer that Tony Blair entered into in the course of the "deal in the desert" in May 2007, and which paved the way for the formal prisoner transfer agreement, was intended by both sides to lead to the rapid return of Mr Megrahi to his homeland. This was the clear understanding of Libyan officials involved in the negotiations and to whom I have spoken.
"It was only after the memorandum of understanding was concluded that [it belatedly sunk in] that the decision on repatriation of this particular prisoner was a matter not for Westminster and Whitehall but for the devolved Scottish Government in Edinburgh, and that government had just come into the hands of the Scottish National Party and so could no longer be expected supinely to follow the UK Labour Government's wishes. That was when the understanding between the UK Government and the Libyan Government started to unravel, to the considerable annoyance and distress of the Libyans, who had been led to believe that repatriation under the PTA was only months away.
“Among the Libyan officials with whom I discussed this matter at the time were Abdulati al-Obeidi, Moussa Koussa and Abdel Rahman Shalgam.”
Wednesday 12 October 2011
Blair challenged over claims Megrahi was 'excluded’ from Prisoner Transfer Agreement
[This is the headline over a report published yesterday evening on the Newsnet Scotland website. It reads as follows (links omitted):]
Tony Blair’s version of events over the Prisoner Transfer Agreement
he hatched with Colonel Gaddafi has been challenged after he claimed
that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had been “specifically excluded” from the
secret deal.
The Scottish National Party has today accused the former Prime Minister of being “economical with the truth” after Mr Blair claimed in a New York Times interview that Lockerbie bomber Al-Megrahi was “specifically excluded” from the “prisoner transfer programme” when he left office.
The Scottish National Party has today accused the former Prime Minister of being “economical with the truth” after Mr Blair claimed in a New York Times interview that Lockerbie bomber Al-Megrahi was “specifically excluded” from the “prisoner transfer programme” when he left office.
Asked about a series of visits he made to Libya in order to speak
with the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi and whether he had been seeking
the release of Megrahi the former Labour leader replied:
“This really is objectionable. When I was British prime minister, when I left office, Megrahi was specifically excluded from the prisoner transfer program. In any event he wasn’t released under that.”
Mr Blair added: “Everyone is always saying, “Didn’t the Libyans ever raise it.” In fact they were always raising it, and I was always explaining the same thing to them which is there’s nothing that can be done about it. You have to go to the Scottish executive, not the British government.”
In fact, the Prisoner Transfer Agreement was not in place when Mr Blair left office. Correspondence between the Scottish and UK government’s indicate that a pledge from the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer to the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill in June 2007 that “any Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya could not cover Mr al-Megrahi” was never honoured.
A letter from Lord Chancellor Jack Straw in December 2007 subsequently confirmed that “in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom”, Megrahi would not be excluded.
Mr Straw wrote: “I had previously accepted the importance of the al-Megrahi issue to Scotland and said I would try to get an exclusion for him on the face of the agreement. I have not been able to secure an explicit exclusion.”
In all, the First Minister Alex Salmond and Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill wrote to the UK Government on eight separate occasions – and as late as September 2008 – insisting that Megrahi should be excluded from the terms of the PTA. However the UK Labour Government refused the requests because of trade and diplomatic factors with the Gaddafi regime.
Tony Blair’s claim that Mr Megrahi had been excluded from any PTA when he left office was further undermined when his former aide, who was with him at the time of the ‘Deal in the Desert’ John McTernan, claimed that al-Megrahi had indeed been part of the deal.
Speaking on Newsnight last summer, Mr McTernan said that the Libyan had been included in the deal in recognition of Gaddafi having given up nuclear weapons and that the British government would have been happy to see Megrahi sent back to Libya.
Commenting, SNP Westminster Leader and Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Angus Robertson MP said: “Not for the first time, Tony Blair has been caught out being economical with the truth. The reality is that the Scottish Government repeatedly called on the UK Labour Government to exclude Megrahi from the terms of the PTA, but they reneged on their pledge to do so. It is inconceivable that it would have been any different had Tony Blair remained in office.
“The fact is – as we know from Sir Gus O’Donnell’s report – that the UK Labour Government did ‘all it could’ to facilitate Megrahi’s release for reasons of trade and diplomacy with the Gaddafi regime.
“Just as Tony Blair was incapable of telling the truth about the invasion of Iraq, he is being extremely economical with the truth about Labour’s hypocrisy over Megrahi.”
Controversy has always surrounded Mr Blair’s now notorious ‘Deal in the Desert’ with Gaddafi. In 2007 there was anger after details of the secret deal was made public by the then newly elected First Minister Alex Salmond.
The First Minister’s exposing of the secret negotiations between the British government and the former Libyan dictator led to an infamous spat between Mr Salmond and the BBC presenter Kirsty Wark. The BBC were subsequently forced to issue an apology.
[The Herald's report on the matter can be read here.]
Monday 4 January 2010
We were right to complain about Lockerbie prisoner pact, says SNP
[This is the headline over an article in today's issue of The Times. It refers to the report in yesterday's issue of The Observer that forms the subject-matter of the blog post that can be read here. The article in The Times reads in part:]
The Scottish government claimed last night it had been fully justified in protesting that Tony Blair’s Government had kept it in the dark about a prisoner transfer agreement negotiated between the UK and Libya.
Its comments came after the publication of e-mails in a Sunday newspaper which revealed that the Government at Westminster had tried to secure the backing of the Scottish government for the deal — which allowed for the release of the Lockerbie bomber — weeks after it had agreed to it in principle in 2007.
The disclosure of the prisoner transfer agreement led to furious exchanges between the UK Government and Alex Salmond’s Scottish Administration, with the Scots saying that they had not been consulted. While the Blair Government responded by saying that the agreement did not specifically refer to Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in Greenock jail at the time, Mr Salmond pointed out that he was the only Libyan prisoner held in the UK.
A Scottish government spokesman said last night: “This confirms everything that the Scottish government said at the time about how UK ministers kept Scotland in the dark about the prisoner transfer agreement [PTA] process being negotiated by Tony Blair with Libya.
“When we did find out about it, UK ministers at first agreed to our request to have anyone involved in the Lockerbie atrocity excluded from the PTA, but they then reneged on that.”
The e-mails exchanged between both sides in the dispute show civil servants in Whitehall sought to convene a meeting with their Scottish justice counterparts “to establish the UK’s negotiating position” only at the end of June 2007 or the beginning of July 2007. This was more than a month after Mr Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in which both sides agreed to a binding deal to exchange prisoners.
The e-mails can be seen as bolstering claims that the Blair Government was keen to sign the agreement, which has since being linked with wider deals covering arms exports and oil.
In the same month the memorandum was signed, BP agreed a billion-dollar oil deal with Libya, and Britain agreed to sell the former pariah Libyan state water cannons. (...)
The e-mails will serve to reinforce suspicions that the UK Government was willing to ride roughshod over Scottish sensitivities when it came to the Lockerbie bomber.
In an emergency statement at Holyrood at the time, Mr Salmond expressed his fury that the understanding signed between Blair and the Libyans did not specifically exclude al-Megrahi. Over the next few months, Mr Salmond made several requests for al-Megrahi to be excluded from the agreement. In December 2007, Jack Straw finally wrote to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, to say that he had been unable to secure such an exclusion and that time had run out.
In the event, the prisoner transfer agreement was not used in the case of al-Megrahi. To the undisguised fury of American relatives of the 270 Lockerbie victims, he was released on the ground of compassion by Mr MacAskill in August last year. The reason for his release was that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and he had only about three months to live. (...)
The Scottish government claimed last night it had been fully justified in protesting that Tony Blair’s Government had kept it in the dark about a prisoner transfer agreement negotiated between the UK and Libya.
Its comments came after the publication of e-mails in a Sunday newspaper which revealed that the Government at Westminster had tried to secure the backing of the Scottish government for the deal — which allowed for the release of the Lockerbie bomber — weeks after it had agreed to it in principle in 2007.
The disclosure of the prisoner transfer agreement led to furious exchanges between the UK Government and Alex Salmond’s Scottish Administration, with the Scots saying that they had not been consulted. While the Blair Government responded by saying that the agreement did not specifically refer to Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in Greenock jail at the time, Mr Salmond pointed out that he was the only Libyan prisoner held in the UK.
A Scottish government spokesman said last night: “This confirms everything that the Scottish government said at the time about how UK ministers kept Scotland in the dark about the prisoner transfer agreement [PTA] process being negotiated by Tony Blair with Libya.
“When we did find out about it, UK ministers at first agreed to our request to have anyone involved in the Lockerbie atrocity excluded from the PTA, but they then reneged on that.”
The e-mails exchanged between both sides in the dispute show civil servants in Whitehall sought to convene a meeting with their Scottish justice counterparts “to establish the UK’s negotiating position” only at the end of June 2007 or the beginning of July 2007. This was more than a month after Mr Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in which both sides agreed to a binding deal to exchange prisoners.
The e-mails can be seen as bolstering claims that the Blair Government was keen to sign the agreement, which has since being linked with wider deals covering arms exports and oil.
In the same month the memorandum was signed, BP agreed a billion-dollar oil deal with Libya, and Britain agreed to sell the former pariah Libyan state water cannons. (...)
The e-mails will serve to reinforce suspicions that the UK Government was willing to ride roughshod over Scottish sensitivities when it came to the Lockerbie bomber.
In an emergency statement at Holyrood at the time, Mr Salmond expressed his fury that the understanding signed between Blair and the Libyans did not specifically exclude al-Megrahi. Over the next few months, Mr Salmond made several requests for al-Megrahi to be excluded from the agreement. In December 2007, Jack Straw finally wrote to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, to say that he had been unable to secure such an exclusion and that time had run out.
In the event, the prisoner transfer agreement was not used in the case of al-Megrahi. To the undisguised fury of American relatives of the 270 Lockerbie victims, he was released on the ground of compassion by Mr MacAskill in August last year. The reason for his release was that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and he had only about three months to live. (...)
Wednesday 17 February 2016
Lockerbie, Megrahi and the Prisoner Transfer Agreement: a mystery
[What follows is the text of an article by retired British diplomat Sir Brian Barder that was published in The Scotsman on this date in 2011:]
Megrahi at centre of transfer deal mystery
Why did the UK agree a deal with Gaddafi to send the Lockerbie bomber to Libya in defiance of a binding United Nations resolution?
There’s a major mystery in the newly released British government documents containing new revelations about the controversial release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Moreover it’s puzzling that the mystery was never raised when the prime minister, David Cameron, made a statement and answered questions about the documents in the House of Commons on 7 February. It’s the hippopotamus in the living-room that everyone is apparently too polite to mention.
Here’s the mystery. In August 1998 the US and UK governments invited the United Nations Security Council to approve an initiative under which the two Libyans suspected of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing would be tried in a special court in the Netherlands under Scottish law. The Security Council duly approved the initiative in a formal resolution passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, meaning that the resolution has binding force on all UN member states under international law. But the relevant point is this: the US-UK letter setting out the initiative, as approved by the mandatory UN resolution, stipulates in terms that if convicted, the suspects “will serve their sentence in the United Kingdom” – in practice meaning in Scotland, since all the proceedings were to be governed by Scottish law. One of the two suspects was later acquitted: the other, Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a 27-year tariff. Megrahi duly began to serve his sentence in a Scottish prison.
Now fast-forward to 2007. Western relations with Libya have been ‘normalised’ following Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons programme, sanctions have been lifted and UK firms are negotiating for lucrative and now legitimate contracts with Libya. Tony Blair, then the UK prime minister, on the last of his visits to Libya, signs an agreement with Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in which the two governments promise to sign a Prisoner Transfer Agreement within a year. The PTA allows a Libyan convict held in a UK prison to be transferred to serve the balance of his or her sentence in prison in Libya (and vice versa). The Libyans make it clear that agreement to a PTA is the key to approval of various contracts with UK firms. The only Libyan in a UK jail is Megrahi. Everyone understands that Libyan insistence on a PTA is intended to open the way to the eventual repatriation of Megrahi to Libya – theoretically to serve the rest of his 27-year sentence in a Libyan prison. The Scottish Government in Edinburgh, responsible under Scottish law for any decision affecting Megrahi’s future, repeatedly makes it clear that it is strongly opposed to the use of the PTA for transferring him to Libya. But the PTA is signed under the British government’s foreign affairs power and the Scottish Government has no veto over it. The mystery here is obvious. The UK-US initiative approved by the Security Council resolution stipulates that Megrahi must serve his sentence in the UK. The PTA envisages that he could be transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence in Libya. The PTA is obviously inconsistent with the initiative and thus with a binding UN resolution. So what was the point of the PTA?
It emerges from the newly released documents that in the course of discussions about the proposed PTA, the Scottish Government asked the British government whether there would be any obstacle in international law to the transfer of Megrahi to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement if the Scottish Justice Secretary were to agree to such a transfer. After scratching its head, the British government replied, surprisingly, that there was not. The documents don’t explain how the British government arrived at this counter-intuitive conclusion, with which (even more surprisingly) the US government had agreed. But the documents do reveal a sharp disagreement between London and Washington over whether Megrahi’s transfer to Libya under the PTA would be in breach of the UK’s political (as distinct from legal) commitment to Megrahi serving his sentence in a UK prison. The Americans said it would; the UK government said it would not. Moreover, the Americans maintained that Megrahi could not be transferred to a Libyan prison under the PTA without their prior agreement, since the whole initiative under which Megrahi had been tried and jailed had been jointly devised by the US and UK governments. Again, the UK government disagreed, claiming that for it to transfer Megrahi under the PTA it would only need to inform the Americans (and the UN): American agreement, said the British, was not required.
How were the UK government’s lawyers to square this awkward circle? They argued that the UK commitment could not have been “absolute”, because no British government could commit its successor (a novel and inherently subversive doctrine in international relations) and also because it could not have ruled out the possibility of a change in UK relations with Libya – another novel doctrine, allowing any government to wriggle out of its commitments at will. For whatever reasons, the British government apparently decided not to disclose to the Scottish Government either its disagreement with the Americans over the status of the (“political”) commitment that Megrahi must serve his sentence in the UK, nor the grounds for its contention that there was no conflict between the two instruments.
It’s understandable that Tony Blair and his government were keen to satisfy Libyan demands implicitly concerning Megrahi so that valuable UK-Libyan commercial contracts could go ahead. Getting Megrahi back to Libya would clearly be in Britain’s commercial and diplomatic interests. But did Blair point out to the Libyans during the lengthy negotiation of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement that under the US-UK initiative and the UN resolution Megrahi could not be transferred to a Libyan prison? If not, why not? Were the Libyans or indeed Blair and his officials aware of the inconsistency? Could they have failed to notice it? The feeble grounds devised by the UK for its argument that there was no inconsistency, and that the UK could have legitimately gone ahead unilaterally in obvious breach of a mandatory UN resolution, suggest that the UK decision to have a Prisoner Transfer Agreement was taken first, and the lawyers were only later instructed to devise a justification for its obvious conflict with the UN resolution.
In the event Megrahi’s diagnosis with terminal cancer spared the Scottish Justice Secretary the need to respond to an application for his transfer to a Libyan prison under the PTA, which he had always opposed and would not have agreed to: his decision instead to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds was fully consistent with the US-UK initiative, the UN resolution embodying it, Scottish law and precedent, and humanitarian principles – although that hasn’t stopped the new British prime minister, the President and several Senators and Congressmen of the United States, and some (but not all) of the relatives of the Lockerbie victims passionately denouncing the decision. There’s no love lost between Mr Cameron on the one hand and the Scottish government or the former Labour government on the other, so his denunciation of Kenny MacAskill’s compassionate release decision is understandable in political terms, if not in human ones. But why did David Cameron not point out in his Commons statement that to have transferred Megrahi under the PTA would have flagrantly contravened not only the whole agreed basis for Megrahi’s trial and imprisonment but also a mandatory resolution of the Security Council? How on earth did he fail to spot the dirty great hippo in that living-room next door?
- Sir Brian Barder is a former British ambassador to both Ethiopia and Poland and a former High Commissioner to Nigeria [and Australia — BLB]. He never had any official involvement in relations with Libya or the Lockerbie affair.
Sunday 25 July 2010
Lockerbie: now pressure switches to America
[This is the headline over an article in today's edition of The Sunday Herald. It reads in part:]
Pressure is growing on the US government to release secret documents which detail its position on the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
As the trans-Atlantic row deepens over why Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish jail last summer, the US government is being urged to drop its ban on the publication of letters it sent to both the Scottish Government and Whitehall on the issue.
The US government refused Holyrood permission to make the papers public in a strongly worded letter last September, a month after Megrahi, who has terminal cancer, was allowed to return to Libya following his compassionate release.
But the move to make the documents public took a step forward as the Senate committee on foreign affairs prepares for Thursday’s inquiry into the prisoner’s release, with chairman Senator Robert Menendez requesting that the Scottish Government provide information on Megrahi’s release in five key areas.
They include “any documents including communications to or from Scottish Government officials, relating to the US government’s position on Al Megrahi’s release or transfer to Libyan custody.”
A spokesman for the Scottish Government said last night: “We have received another letter from Senator Menendez, who will chair next week’s hearing, and who has now asked for us to provide five categories of documents relating to the case. We are more than happy to do so, and indeed have already published all we hold on this issue, with the exception of some documents where permission for publication has so far been declined.
“These unpublished documents include correspondence between the Scottish Government and the US Government, whose release Senator Menendez has now requested. We would urge the Senator and his colleagues to work with their own Government so that the remaining information we hold can be published in the interests of maximum transparency.”
The Scottish Government also denied reports that Alex Salmond received a letter from committee member Senator Frank Lautenberg, who is said to have “pleaded” with the First Minister to send a representative to the hearing to add “credibility” to proceedings.
[Another article in the same newspaper by James Cusick contains the following:]
Of all the missing pieces in the jigsaw of information on the Lockerbie bombing and its aftermath one of the most confusing is Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal against his conviction for the greatest terrorist atrocity ever perpetrated over Scottish soil. (...)
The Scottish Government had repeatedly branded the 2007 Prisoner Transfer Agreement between the UK and Libya – brokered in Tripoli in May 2007 by the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his foreign affairs adviser, Sir Nigel Sheinwald – as unconstitutional because it took no account of Scotland’s separate legal identity from the UK Government,
For the prisoner transfer agreement to go ahead Megrahi would have had to drop his appeal. But MacAskill rejected the PTA and opted instead to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds, under the terms of which the appeal could have gone ahead as planned. Yet Megrahi opted to drop it. Why? (...)
MacAskill will have known the full facts that lay behind the SCCRC’s decision to grant the appeal. The commission produced an 800-page report of the decision taken at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001. It was a Scottish court sitting in an independent country, and heard by three high court judges. A further 14 pages offered evaluation of new evidence and new circumstances surrounding the case against Megrahi, and identified six key areas where a potential miscarriage of justice may have taken place. (...)
Perhaps the most damning fall-out from the imminent appeal process, however, is the potential shredding of the evidence used to convict Megrahi and the unanswered questions about why they were admitted to court in the first place. Other uncomfortable questions centre on why wider investigations into the background of key witnesses did not take place on any scale that would have routinely been tested in a different legal arena.
Crucial to Megrahi’s conviction was the prosecution’s ability to place him in Malta on December 7, 1988. That was the day the court identified as the date a purchase was made at Mary’s House, a shop run by Tony Gauci. Clothes bought in the Sliema shop on this specific date were said to have been in the Samsonite case containing the explosive device.
Gauci was the witness who identified Megrahi as buying the clothes from his shop, on December 7. (...) This is crucial because the Libyan’s passport states that he was in Malta at that time. But if the clothes purchase was made earlier then Megrahi couldn’t have been in Malta at the time. That is the new picture painted in the evidence reviewed by the SCCRC. Gauci’s identification of Megrahi in his shop is also questioned.
Documents also allege that at an early stage of the US-UK investigation Gauci asked for, and was given, $2m by the US Department of Justice for his contributions to the case.
Other new areas of evidence which cast doubt on the conviction included documents said to have come from the CIA which relate to the ‘Mebo’ timer that is said to have been the key device which detonated the bomb on the aircraft. Details of these documents were not given to Megrahi’s defence counsel.
The owner of the Mebo firm, Edwin Bollier, is also listed in review of the evidence as claiming that in 1991 the FBI offered him $4m to testify that the fragments of a timer found near the scene of the crash were part of a Mebo MST-13 timer which the company said had been supplied to Libya.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is supposed to be the outcome of any legal process seeking justice. The appeal of Megrahi, had it gone ahead, suggests that Scottish justice fell short in the way it dealt with Lockerbie.
[A third article in The Sunday Herald by Tom Gordon reads in part:]
To many observers, it was the day Kenny MacAskill crossed a line. Before BP’s oil spill made it the focus for conspiracy theories, it was also the moment some felt ministers pressured a dying man to spare the blushes of the Scots legal system.
Just before 9am on Wednesday, August 5 last year, the Justice Secretary entered Greenock Prison for a meeting with inmate 55725. (...)
On May 5, the Libyan government had applied for Megrahi’s release under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) initiated by Tony Blair.
The following month, on the advice of George Burgess, head of the government’s criminal law and licensing division, MacAskill agreed to meetings with key players in the Lockerbie case, including Megrahi.
On July 24, Megrahi made a separate application for release on compassionate grounds. (...)
MacAskill came with Robert Gordon, director of the Justice Department, and Linda Miller, from the Criminal Law and Licensing Division.
According to official notes of the meeting, MacAskill said he would be considering both applications for release “in parallel”.
After asserting his innocence, Megrahi gave a history of his case, from his surrender in 1999, to trial at Camp Zeist in 2001, up to the present day, his illness, separation from his family, and feeling of “desolation”.
MacAskill stressed he could only grant a PTA transfer if there were no court proceedings ongoing – in other words, if Megrahi dropped his appeals against conviction and sentence.
“Mr Megrahi confirmed he understood this point,” the note recorded.
However, according to one of those close to events, Megrahi wrongly took this to mean that dropping his appeals was also a pre-condition of compassionate release. It wasn’t.
“MacAskill said something stupid. He shouldn’t have mentioned the appeal at all. “[The two processes] were conflated. That’s ultimately what Megrahi took from it,” said the source.
A week later, Megrahi signalled he was dropping his appeals.
His QC, Maggie Scott, told the High Court her client thought this would “assist in the early determination of these applications”.
Note the “applications” plural. (...)
A senior legal source told the Sunday Herald Megrahi was definitely under the false impression that abandoning his appeals would help secure compassionate release.
However the Libyan may simply have calculated that with MacAskill considering the PTA and compassionate applications at the same time, ending his appeals would leave both options open rather than just one. [Note by RB: This is the correct interpretation. Mr Megrahi was very well aware that compassionate release did not require abandonment of the appeal. Equally, he knew that prisoner transfer did; and he, like his government, was still labouring under the lingering impression created by Blair and Sheinwald during the "deal in the desert" that his repatriation under the PTA was really a done deal. Release under the PTA was what was really expected, because that was what Nigel and Tony had led the Libyan government to believe.]
On September 2, by a majority vote, the Scottish Parliament declared MacAskill had “mishandled” the release decision, and that meeting Megrahi while considering his application for compassionate release was “wrong”, and an “inappropriate precedent”.
[An editorial in the same newspaper headlined "Don’t let America give us lessons in justice" contains the following:]
[E]ven if MacAskill’s decision was flawed – and that is surely a subjective opinion – there remains no evidence that BP played any role whatsoever in persuading the Justice Minister to release Megrahi. The Scottish Government has insisted it received no representations from the oil company, and that it had no contact with it. There is no evidence, or indeed any serious suggestion, that is not the case.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that the Westminster Government wanted Megrahi free and that it was lobbied by BP to pave the way for his return to Libya.
It was the Westminster Government – albeit not the present Government – that agreed the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya when Megrahi was the only significant Libyan in a British jail. It was a Westminster Government which specifically agreed not to exclude Megrahi from that agreement. And it was a Westminster Government that decided to agree a strategy of bringing Libya back in from the cold. BP has already admitted lobbying Westminster for a quick conclusion to the prisoner transfer agreement so that trade with Libya could resume. Indeed, a deal between the Libyan government and BP was signed almost immediately after the prisoner transfer agreement was approved. All this is in the public domain. It does not require an inquiry in America to establish these facts.
It was only when it became apparent that Westminister did not have the legal authority to release Megrahi that the matter landed on MacAskill’s desk. Westminster may have officially kept its wishes to itself while MacAskill was making his deliberations but there can be no doubt that it privately wished Megrahi freed. It had already agreed a deal to make that happen.
In the end, MacAskill went against the prisoner transfer agreement but instead decided on compassionate release. It is acceptable to question the wisdom of that decision. It is not acceptable to question MacAskill’s right to make it.
Yet if the events surrounding Megrahi’s death are known, there are many facts about his conviction, and in particular his appeal against that conviction, which remain shrouded in mystery.
By all means we should have an inquiry which would allow the serious doubts about the veracity of the evidence against Megrahi to be aired. But we do not need the inquiry currently being demanded and we do not need America to give us lessons in justice. Alex Salmond is right to have nothing to do with it.
Pressure is growing on the US government to release secret documents which detail its position on the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
As the trans-Atlantic row deepens over why Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish jail last summer, the US government is being urged to drop its ban on the publication of letters it sent to both the Scottish Government and Whitehall on the issue.
The US government refused Holyrood permission to make the papers public in a strongly worded letter last September, a month after Megrahi, who has terminal cancer, was allowed to return to Libya following his compassionate release.
But the move to make the documents public took a step forward as the Senate committee on foreign affairs prepares for Thursday’s inquiry into the prisoner’s release, with chairman Senator Robert Menendez requesting that the Scottish Government provide information on Megrahi’s release in five key areas.
They include “any documents including communications to or from Scottish Government officials, relating to the US government’s position on Al Megrahi’s release or transfer to Libyan custody.”
A spokesman for the Scottish Government said last night: “We have received another letter from Senator Menendez, who will chair next week’s hearing, and who has now asked for us to provide five categories of documents relating to the case. We are more than happy to do so, and indeed have already published all we hold on this issue, with the exception of some documents where permission for publication has so far been declined.
“These unpublished documents include correspondence between the Scottish Government and the US Government, whose release Senator Menendez has now requested. We would urge the Senator and his colleagues to work with their own Government so that the remaining information we hold can be published in the interests of maximum transparency.”
The Scottish Government also denied reports that Alex Salmond received a letter from committee member Senator Frank Lautenberg, who is said to have “pleaded” with the First Minister to send a representative to the hearing to add “credibility” to proceedings.
[Another article in the same newspaper by James Cusick contains the following:]
Of all the missing pieces in the jigsaw of information on the Lockerbie bombing and its aftermath one of the most confusing is Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal against his conviction for the greatest terrorist atrocity ever perpetrated over Scottish soil. (...)
The Scottish Government had repeatedly branded the 2007 Prisoner Transfer Agreement between the UK and Libya – brokered in Tripoli in May 2007 by the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his foreign affairs adviser, Sir Nigel Sheinwald – as unconstitutional because it took no account of Scotland’s separate legal identity from the UK Government,
For the prisoner transfer agreement to go ahead Megrahi would have had to drop his appeal. But MacAskill rejected the PTA and opted instead to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds, under the terms of which the appeal could have gone ahead as planned. Yet Megrahi opted to drop it. Why? (...)
MacAskill will have known the full facts that lay behind the SCCRC’s decision to grant the appeal. The commission produced an 800-page report of the decision taken at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001. It was a Scottish court sitting in an independent country, and heard by three high court judges. A further 14 pages offered evaluation of new evidence and new circumstances surrounding the case against Megrahi, and identified six key areas where a potential miscarriage of justice may have taken place. (...)
Perhaps the most damning fall-out from the imminent appeal process, however, is the potential shredding of the evidence used to convict Megrahi and the unanswered questions about why they were admitted to court in the first place. Other uncomfortable questions centre on why wider investigations into the background of key witnesses did not take place on any scale that would have routinely been tested in a different legal arena.
Crucial to Megrahi’s conviction was the prosecution’s ability to place him in Malta on December 7, 1988. That was the day the court identified as the date a purchase was made at Mary’s House, a shop run by Tony Gauci. Clothes bought in the Sliema shop on this specific date were said to have been in the Samsonite case containing the explosive device.
Gauci was the witness who identified Megrahi as buying the clothes from his shop, on December 7. (...) This is crucial because the Libyan’s passport states that he was in Malta at that time. But if the clothes purchase was made earlier then Megrahi couldn’t have been in Malta at the time. That is the new picture painted in the evidence reviewed by the SCCRC. Gauci’s identification of Megrahi in his shop is also questioned.
Documents also allege that at an early stage of the US-UK investigation Gauci asked for, and was given, $2m by the US Department of Justice for his contributions to the case.
Other new areas of evidence which cast doubt on the conviction included documents said to have come from the CIA which relate to the ‘Mebo’ timer that is said to have been the key device which detonated the bomb on the aircraft. Details of these documents were not given to Megrahi’s defence counsel.
The owner of the Mebo firm, Edwin Bollier, is also listed in review of the evidence as claiming that in 1991 the FBI offered him $4m to testify that the fragments of a timer found near the scene of the crash were part of a Mebo MST-13 timer which the company said had been supplied to Libya.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is supposed to be the outcome of any legal process seeking justice. The appeal of Megrahi, had it gone ahead, suggests that Scottish justice fell short in the way it dealt with Lockerbie.
[A third article in The Sunday Herald by Tom Gordon reads in part:]
To many observers, it was the day Kenny MacAskill crossed a line. Before BP’s oil spill made it the focus for conspiracy theories, it was also the moment some felt ministers pressured a dying man to spare the blushes of the Scots legal system.
Just before 9am on Wednesday, August 5 last year, the Justice Secretary entered Greenock Prison for a meeting with inmate 55725. (...)
On May 5, the Libyan government had applied for Megrahi’s release under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) initiated by Tony Blair.
The following month, on the advice of George Burgess, head of the government’s criminal law and licensing division, MacAskill agreed to meetings with key players in the Lockerbie case, including Megrahi.
On July 24, Megrahi made a separate application for release on compassionate grounds. (...)
MacAskill came with Robert Gordon, director of the Justice Department, and Linda Miller, from the Criminal Law and Licensing Division.
According to official notes of the meeting, MacAskill said he would be considering both applications for release “in parallel”.
After asserting his innocence, Megrahi gave a history of his case, from his surrender in 1999, to trial at Camp Zeist in 2001, up to the present day, his illness, separation from his family, and feeling of “desolation”.
MacAskill stressed he could only grant a PTA transfer if there were no court proceedings ongoing – in other words, if Megrahi dropped his appeals against conviction and sentence.
“Mr Megrahi confirmed he understood this point,” the note recorded.
However, according to one of those close to events, Megrahi wrongly took this to mean that dropping his appeals was also a pre-condition of compassionate release. It wasn’t.
“MacAskill said something stupid. He shouldn’t have mentioned the appeal at all. “[The two processes] were conflated. That’s ultimately what Megrahi took from it,” said the source.
A week later, Megrahi signalled he was dropping his appeals.
His QC, Maggie Scott, told the High Court her client thought this would “assist in the early determination of these applications”.
Note the “applications” plural. (...)
A senior legal source told the Sunday Herald Megrahi was definitely under the false impression that abandoning his appeals would help secure compassionate release.
However the Libyan may simply have calculated that with MacAskill considering the PTA and compassionate applications at the same time, ending his appeals would leave both options open rather than just one. [Note by RB: This is the correct interpretation. Mr Megrahi was very well aware that compassionate release did not require abandonment of the appeal. Equally, he knew that prisoner transfer did; and he, like his government, was still labouring under the lingering impression created by Blair and Sheinwald during the "deal in the desert" that his repatriation under the PTA was really a done deal. Release under the PTA was what was really expected, because that was what Nigel and Tony had led the Libyan government to believe.]
On September 2, by a majority vote, the Scottish Parliament declared MacAskill had “mishandled” the release decision, and that meeting Megrahi while considering his application for compassionate release was “wrong”, and an “inappropriate precedent”.
[An editorial in the same newspaper headlined "Don’t let America give us lessons in justice" contains the following:]
[E]ven if MacAskill’s decision was flawed – and that is surely a subjective opinion – there remains no evidence that BP played any role whatsoever in persuading the Justice Minister to release Megrahi. The Scottish Government has insisted it received no representations from the oil company, and that it had no contact with it. There is no evidence, or indeed any serious suggestion, that is not the case.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that the Westminster Government wanted Megrahi free and that it was lobbied by BP to pave the way for his return to Libya.
It was the Westminster Government – albeit not the present Government – that agreed the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya when Megrahi was the only significant Libyan in a British jail. It was a Westminster Government which specifically agreed not to exclude Megrahi from that agreement. And it was a Westminster Government that decided to agree a strategy of bringing Libya back in from the cold. BP has already admitted lobbying Westminster for a quick conclusion to the prisoner transfer agreement so that trade with Libya could resume. Indeed, a deal between the Libyan government and BP was signed almost immediately after the prisoner transfer agreement was approved. All this is in the public domain. It does not require an inquiry in America to establish these facts.
It was only when it became apparent that Westminister did not have the legal authority to release Megrahi that the matter landed on MacAskill’s desk. Westminster may have officially kept its wishes to itself while MacAskill was making his deliberations but there can be no doubt that it privately wished Megrahi freed. It had already agreed a deal to make that happen.
In the end, MacAskill went against the prisoner transfer agreement but instead decided on compassionate release. It is acceptable to question the wisdom of that decision. It is not acceptable to question MacAskill’s right to make it.
Yet if the events surrounding Megrahi’s death are known, there are many facts about his conviction, and in particular his appeal against that conviction, which remain shrouded in mystery.
By all means we should have an inquiry which would allow the serious doubts about the veracity of the evidence against Megrahi to be aired. But we do not need the inquiry currently being demanded and we do not need America to give us lessons in justice. Alex Salmond is right to have nothing to do with it.
Thursday 24 December 2015
24 December 2007: Libya anticipates Megrahi's return
[On this date in 2007 I posted on this blog an item that reads as follows:]
Al-Megrahi May Come Home Very Soon
Today the Libyaonline website runs an article, apparently from the Tripoli Post, with this title. Again, it embodies the assumption that, because the United Kingdom Government and Libya have concluded a prisoner transfer agreement and because Mr Megrahi is not specifically excluded from its operation, therefore he will soon be heading home to Tripoli. This is a quite unwarranted assumption. It is the Scottish Government, not the UK Government, that must consent to any transfer. I have seen no indication anywhere that such consent is likely to be forthcoming or, indeed, that any approaches have been made to the Scottish Ministers to sound them out.
[The website in question no longer exists as a news aggregation site. However, the article is still to be found on The Tripoli Post website. It reads as follows:]
The innocent Libyan citizen, Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi, who have been unfairly convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and has been in a Scottish prison since 2001, may soon come home.
Britain is about to sign a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) with Libya which will pave the way for the eventual return of Al-Megrahi to Tripoli. A letter was sent by Jack Straw, the British Justice Secretary, to Tripoli Wednesday night outlining the agreement.
According to The Scotsman quoting Thursday unidentified source, "Jack Straw will be signing the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya tonight. Megrahi will not be listed in the treaty as somebody who is specifically excluded."
"The Libyans would not agree to that. But as Kenny MacAskill discussed with Jack, there is a safeguard in that Scottish ministers will have to decide in each transfer case from a Scottish prison,” The Scotsman added.
The deal comes just 48 hours before the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, which claimed 270 lives in 1988.
New evidence has recently published including an inclusively crucial affidavit from Eng Ulrich Lumpert, to definitely exonerate Mr Al-Megrahi and Libya from any participation in the bombing of PanAm 103.
A Scottish Government source said Justice Secretary Jack Straw spoke to his opposite number north of the border, Kenny MacAskill, and told him Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not be excluded from the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) expected to be finalised soon, the Associated Press reported.
Al-Megrahi, who is serving life in Greenock Prison, is currently pursuing a second appeal against his 2001 conviction for bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21 1988.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a memorandum of understanding during a visit to Libya in May 2007, kicking off negotiations on an agreement allowing the transfer of prisoners between the justice systems of the two countries.
Al-Megrahi May Come Home Very Soon
Today the Libyaonline website runs an article, apparently from the Tripoli Post, with this title. Again, it embodies the assumption that, because the United Kingdom Government and Libya have concluded a prisoner transfer agreement and because Mr Megrahi is not specifically excluded from its operation, therefore he will soon be heading home to Tripoli. This is a quite unwarranted assumption. It is the Scottish Government, not the UK Government, that must consent to any transfer. I have seen no indication anywhere that such consent is likely to be forthcoming or, indeed, that any approaches have been made to the Scottish Ministers to sound them out.
[The website in question no longer exists as a news aggregation site. However, the article is still to be found on The Tripoli Post website. It reads as follows:]
The innocent Libyan citizen, Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi, who have been unfairly convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and has been in a Scottish prison since 2001, may soon come home.
Britain is about to sign a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) with Libya which will pave the way for the eventual return of Al-Megrahi to Tripoli. A letter was sent by Jack Straw, the British Justice Secretary, to Tripoli Wednesday night outlining the agreement.
According to The Scotsman quoting Thursday unidentified source, "Jack Straw will be signing the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya tonight. Megrahi will not be listed in the treaty as somebody who is specifically excluded."
"The Libyans would not agree to that. But as Kenny MacAskill discussed with Jack, there is a safeguard in that Scottish ministers will have to decide in each transfer case from a Scottish prison,” The Scotsman added.
The deal comes just 48 hours before the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, which claimed 270 lives in 1988.
New evidence has recently published including an inclusively crucial affidavit from Eng Ulrich Lumpert, to definitely exonerate Mr Al-Megrahi and Libya from any participation in the bombing of PanAm 103.
A Scottish Government source said Justice Secretary Jack Straw spoke to his opposite number north of the border, Kenny MacAskill, and told him Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not be excluded from the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) expected to be finalised soon, the Associated Press reported.
Al-Megrahi, who is serving life in Greenock Prison, is currently pursuing a second appeal against his 2001 conviction for bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21 1988.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a memorandum of understanding during a visit to Libya in May 2007, kicking off negotiations on an agreement allowing the transfer of prisoners between the justice systems of the two countries.
Saturday 30 August 2014
Megrahi's release and the "deal in the desert"
Five years ago, the media furore over the compassionate release of Abdelbaset Megrahi was showing no sign of dying down. Here are excerpts from an item -- one of several -- published on this blog on 30 August 2009:
Jack Straw, the UK Justice Secretary, has described as "absurd" suggestions that trade deals had anything to do with the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. (...)
His comments were made as the father of one of the victims of the bombing of Pan Am 103 said it was time "to stop mulling over the why and wherefore of Megrahi’s release" and Nelson Mandela sent a letter of support to the Scottish Government. (...)
Mr Straw said: "The implication that, somehow or other, we have done some back-door deal in order to release Mr Megrahi is simply nonsense.
"What makes this whole debate absurd now is that Mr Megrahi was not released under the prisoner transfer agreement."
Mr Straw admitted that in return for Libya abandoning its nuclear weapons programme there were moves to "establish wider relations including trade", but added: "the suggestion that at any stage there was some kind of back-door deal done over Mr Megrahi’s transfer because of trade is simply untrue". (...)
[Notes by RB:
1. It is disingenuous in the extreme for Jack Straw to claim that the debate over a deal between the UK and Libyan Governments over Abdelbaset Megrahi is absurd because he was in fact repatriated, not under the prisoner transfer agreement, but through compassionate release.
The memorandum of understanding regarding prisoner transfer that Tony Blair entered into in the course of the "deal in the desert" (and which paved the way for the formal prisoner transfer agreement) was intended by both sides to lead to the rapid return of Mr Megrahi to his homeland. This was the clear understanding of Libyan officials involved in the negotiations and to whom I have spoken.
It was only after the memorandum of understanding was concluded that Downing Street and the Foreign Office belatedly realised that the decision on repatriation of this particular prisoner was a matter not for Westminster and Whitehall but for the devolved Scottish Government in Edinburgh -- and that government had just come into the hands of the Scottish National Party and so could no longer be expected supinely to follow the UK Labour Government's wishes. That was when the understanding between the UK Government and the Libyan Government started to unravel, to the considerable annoyance and distress of the Libyans, who had been led to believe that repatriation under the PTA was only months away.
2. The letter from Dr Swire that is referred to in The Herald's article reads as follows:]
Lockerbie: the truth must be known
Before the Lockerbie trial, brokered by Nelson Mandela, had begun, I believed that it would reveal the guilt of the two Libyans in the murder of my daughter and all those others.
I have always believed that we should look for how something of benefit to the world could be somehow squeezed out of the appalling spectacle of brutal mass murder laid before us on those gentle Scottish hills. From before the Lockerbie trial, whilst still believing in Megrahi's guilt, I hoped even then that commercial links could be rebuilt between Libya and Britain for the benefit of both in the future. That was one of the reasons I went to talk to Gaddafi in 1991. It seemed that Libya's 5 million people with that country's immense oil wealth could mesh well with the many skilled people available among the 5 million population of Scotland.
What I heard at Zeist converted me to believing that the Libyan pair were in fact not involved in the atrocity after all. I remembered Nelson's comment at the time when a trial was agreed "No one country should be complainant, prosecutor and Judge". Yet under Clinton's presidency, the composition of the court had been altered so that Nelson's warning had been ignored. It was President Clinton too who told us all to realise 'its the economy, stupid.' But the UK, in the form of Scottish law, was now to exclude any international element, and the methods used to assemble the evidence revealed that the UK/US collusion was so close that it was safe to consider that alliance as Nelson's 'one country' also.
These matters are political and we have no expertise in that field, which appears distasteful to many. I do feel though that Lord Mandelson's disingenuous comments on the issue of the 'Prisoner Transfer Agreement' should lead him to resign (yet again).
More than 20 years later, we, the relatives, are still denied a full inquiry into the real issues for us - Who was behind the bombing? How was it carried out? Why did the Thatcher government of the day ignore all the warnings they got before Lockerbie? Why did they refuse even to meet us to discuss the setting up of this inquiry? Why was the information about the Heathrow break-in concealed for 12 years so that the trial court did not hear of it till after verdict? Why were we constantly subjected to the ignominy of being denied the truth as to why our families were not protected in what even our crippled FAI (crippled because it too was denied the information about Heathrow) found to have been a preventable disaster?
Let us stop mulling over the why and wherefore of Megrahi's release, I for one am delighted that a man I now consider innocent because of the evidence I was allowed to hear at Zeist is at home with his family at last. Let there be a responsible replacement immediately for the appeal a dying man understandably abandoned to ensure his release. Scotland should now take responsibility for reviewing a verdict which her own SCCRC already distrusts. The public's knowledge of the shifty dealings surrounding the 'Prisoner Transfer Agreement' should help to swell demand for objective assessment of the Megrahi case. Overturning the verdict would open the way for a proper international inquiry into why Lockerbie was allowed to happen, who was really behind it, as well as how the verdict came to be reached.
Let us turn our attention now, please, at last to the question of why we the relatives have been denied our rights to know who really murdered their families, and why those precious lives were not protected.
Saturday 5 September 2009
Straw admits Lockerbie trade link
Trade and oil played a part in the decision to include the Lockerbie bomber in a prisoner transfer deal, Jack Straw has admitted.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the UK justice secretary said trade was "a very big part" of the 2007 talks that led to the prisoner deal with Libya. (...)
But officials admit the prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) was part of a wider set of negotiations aimed at bringing Libya in from the international cold, and improving British trade prospects with the country.
"Libya was a rogue state," Mr Straw told the paper. "We wanted to bring it back into the fold.
"And yes, that included trade because trade is an essential part of it and subsequently there was the BP deal." (...)
A spokesman for Mr Straw said the minister had always made clear that wider considerations such as trade played a part in the negotiation of the PTA. (...)
Deputy First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon said: "All this discussion about the prisoner transfer agreement is academic because al-Megrahi wasn't released under the prisoner transfer agreement.
"Having said that, Jack Straw's comments do tend to support the view that the Scottish Government always took which was that the prisoner transfer agreement was tainted and compromised by trade discussions."
The Scottish National Party MSP added: "That's why I think we were right to both oppose that agreement, but also to reject the application of the Libyan Government to have al-Megrahi released under it."
[The above are extracts from a report on the BBC News website.]
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the UK justice secretary said trade was "a very big part" of the 2007 talks that led to the prisoner deal with Libya. (...)
But officials admit the prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) was part of a wider set of negotiations aimed at bringing Libya in from the international cold, and improving British trade prospects with the country.
"Libya was a rogue state," Mr Straw told the paper. "We wanted to bring it back into the fold.
"And yes, that included trade because trade is an essential part of it and subsequently there was the BP deal." (...)
A spokesman for Mr Straw said the minister had always made clear that wider considerations such as trade played a part in the negotiation of the PTA. (...)
Deputy First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon said: "All this discussion about the prisoner transfer agreement is academic because al-Megrahi wasn't released under the prisoner transfer agreement.
"Having said that, Jack Straw's comments do tend to support the view that the Scottish Government always took which was that the prisoner transfer agreement was tainted and compromised by trade discussions."
The Scottish National Party MSP added: "That's why I think we were right to both oppose that agreement, but also to reject the application of the Libyan Government to have al-Megrahi released under it."
[The above are extracts from a report on the BBC News website.]
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