A new investigation by Declassified has found that British police have run more than a dozen training sessions since 2023 for countries that the UK Government has flagged for their poor human rights record.
Declassified’s FOI revealed that the UK’s College of Policing has run multiple training sessions for Egyptian and Saudi Arabian police forces over the last three years, despite the appalling human rights records of the two regimes.
Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are designated by the UK government as “human rights priority countries” due to their well-documented use of torture, arbitrary detention and the death penalty. So far this year, Saudi Arabia has executed at least 140 people, over half of whom were sentenced to death for non-lethal drug offences.
The involvement of British police in the training of the forces of oppressive states is sadly nothing new, with the College of Policing also criticised for its agreement to provide training for the Bahraini force in 2016, despite the long record of human rights abuses in the Kingdom.
Commenting on what this relationship reveals about the UK’s commitment to opposing the death penalty worldwide, our head of death penalty projects in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, Jeed Basyouni, said:
“This kind of training risks British police getting mixed up in serious human rights abuses – for example Saudi police continue to arrest child protestors who are at risk of death penalty charges, and child defendants like Youssef Al Manasif and Jawad Qureiras remain at risk of execution after joining protests.
“The College has a history of organising ill-advised training for abusive overseas bodies: it previously carried out training in Saudi Arabia which it accepted carried torture risks, while proposing “risk mitigations” including putting out a press statement emphasising the training was “part of a wider programme”.
“Clearly the system that allowed this is broken, as British police bodies should never be getting the UK mixed up in torture or the death penalty, which are abuses the UK Government categorically opposes.
“These revelations make it all the more important that the Government closes loopholes in its policy on Overseas Security and Justice Assistance, or “OSJA” – a policy currently being reviewed by the Foreign Office, which has a fatal flaw of letting ministers approve overseas training even if there is a real risk of the death penalty or torture.”
Read the full piece on Declassified.
