Vee haf vays.....

The House of Lords has ruled that evidence which has, or might have been obtained under torture cannot be used in legal proceedings in this country. This on the basis that torture is an "unqualified evil" which "can never be justified". Right decision but unnecessarily convoluted reasoning in my opinion. The UK courts have always taken a rather more robust line on improperly obtained evidence than, for example, the US. The UK line has always been that the admission of evidence is to be judged on how relevant it is and how likely it is to be true, irrespective of how it was obtained. So if a murder weapon is found in a suspect's house, it would be completely illogical not to allow it to be introduced in evidence, just because the circumstances in which it was found amounted to an illegal search. The illegality of the search is a matter that can be dealt with separately. So as I see it, the justification for not allowing evidence where there is knowledge of, or a suspicion of torture, is quite simply that such evidence is inherently unreliable - end of story.