As many as 90 Afghan nationals are being detained in a holding facility at Camp Bastion, the main British military base in the country, the British Defence Secretary admitted today.
But Philip Hammond denied that the men were being held illegally, as lawyers have claimed.
Responding to accusations that the facility has been kept secret from the British public, Mr Hammond said: “I’m not going to comment on individual cases. What I will say is that the assertion that this is a secret facility is patently ridiculous.”
Mr Hammond put the figure for the total number of men held “in the high tens, around 80, 90”.
He said that parliamentary archives showed that the Government had been transparent about the facility.
Legal documents obtained by the BBC indicated that dozens of suspected insurgents are being held at the base, in what their lawyers claim could amount to unlawful detention and internment. They have also been critical at the lack of access they have had to their clients.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers said the Ministry of Defence has refused them access to their clients and only as a result of legal proceedings have they managed to establish telephone contact.
He said the Government was failing to deal with the suspects “humanely” and according to international law.
“What happens is the UK could have trained the Afghan authorities to detain people lawfully with proper standards and making sure that they are treated humanely. They could have then monitored that, including with ad hoc inspections to make sure that the Afghans were obeying the law. They have chosen not to do so,” he said.
“And they have chosen to go down a route which I think is completely worrying and entirely unconstitutional, where no one’s been told, Parliament has not been told that we have this secret facility. Whatever the solution is, flagrant breaches of the common law and international law, that’s not the answer.”
Mr Hammond dismissed the claims, suggesting the lawyers’ requests would pose a security threat to British troops.
“Let’s be clear what they are asking for: they are asking the court to release these people to turn them back to the battlefield so they can carry on with the activities for which they were detained in the first place, putting British troops and other Isaf (International Security Assistance Force troops) lives at risk,” Mr Hammond said.
He added that the legal proceedings were “at the expense, of course, of the British taxpayer, because Mr Shiner’s actions are funded by the legal aid system”.
Mr Hammond conceded that the number of men held was not ideal and usually no more than 20 would be held at any one time.
“Of course, these numbers that we currently have are far higher than traditionally we would expect to have because the system effectively has been blocked up by the problems with transfer into the Afghan system. You would normally expect to be holding only in the region of 20-odd people.”
British forces in Afghanistan, operating as part of Isaf, are allowed to detain suspects for 96 hours but can hold them for longer in "exceptional circumstances", the Ministry of Defence (MOD) said.
But lawyers said the British Army has no power to continue holding their clients, who were arrested by soldiers in raids in villages in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
They have now launched a bid at the High Court for the right to have the cases brought before a court to determine whether the detainment of their clients is lawful or not.
Mr Hammond insisted that the Government was working towards a swift transfer of the men.
“What we’ve been doing since then is working with the Afghans and with other allies to develop a safe pathway for the transfer of these detainees into the Afghan judicial system,” Mr Hammond said.
“These are people suspected of murdering British troops facilitating or planting or being involved with IEDs (improvised explosive devices) at a time when most people are focused on how we protect our troops from being murdered, whether it’s on the streets of London or on the battlefield. What I didn’t hear in that last interview was any concern about the safety of our troops.”