The UK is opposed to torture and is one of the most active countries in the world in the fight to eradicate it. Ensuring the welfare of British nationals detained abroad is one of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's highest consular priorities, and any allegation of abuse or torture is taken particularly seriously.
Since 1 April 2005 we have collated statistics on the number of cases where we have, with the permission of the British national concerned, raised concerns with the detaining authorities over allegations of torture or abuse. These are as follows:
Number of allegations raised April-December 2005 39 January-December 2006 69 January-December 2007 75 January2008-March 2009 60
Our case files also record all instances where UK nationals have approached departmental staff overseas claiming to have been mistreated overseas. Until this month we did not centrally collate these records, and to extract this information would incur a disproportionate cost. However, since May 2009 we have introduced a new system to record the total number of cases of mistreatment raised with us anywhere in the world, and we expect the first data to be available in October 2009.
While we cannot conduct investigations in another sovereign country ourselves, the objective of our representations to foreign Governments is to end any ongoing mistreatment, and have the incident investigated and the perpetrators of any abuse brought to justice.