You may not have known but it sits in secret most of the time Maybe I have said too much already Who’s on it? I’m not sure I should tell you. “It’s very technical,” is the way he puts it.
Jimmy Knapp used to chair it but he wasn’t there yesterday. What happened to him? You’re very inquisitive today, aren’t you? You wouldn’t want to keep pushing your nose where it isn’t wanted or someone might cut it off.Yes, all right, but putting the question on a larger canvas: should the EU Council of Ministers meet in public? As one of the functionaries addressing the committee said: “The Council of Ministers is the least known institution in the EU despite the fact it is the most powerful.” Despite? Because!Another functionary said it wouldn’t help the public if meetings were open All the “heavy business”, as he put it, was done at lunch. For it is clear that population expansion, concentrated in some of the least developed areas, with tens of millions of people displaced to urban centres where they feel powerless, in societies where government corruption allows slavery to go unpunished, means that this evil will grow rather than shrink in the years ahead.. To repay it, they are forced to work long hours, often seven days a week, every day of the year.

In fact, there are more slaves today than all the people sold from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade.
Who are the millions of slaves in the modern world, and why are their numbers growing? Many are held in bonded labour, particularly in South Asia, having been tricked into taking a loan. At school, we have all been taught that slavery is a thing of the past, and that Wilberforce and Lincoln were among the heroes who eradicated its evils. Yet the harrowing truth is that today, in a new form, there are an estimated 27 million slaves around the world, generating $13bn a year for their owners. Put this immoral legal principle together with the practice of establishing secret jails in foreign countries and we have a profoundly disturbing picture of the way America is conducting its “war on terror”.Far from providing a bulwark against this reckless use of illegal detention, our own Government has chosen to emulate it. The indefinite jailing of a number of foreign nationals in Belmarsh jail, a process which was ruled illegal by the Law Lords last month, is a blight on Britain’s history as a civilised nation.

We will find out today whether the Home Secretary intends to grant these detainees the same legal rights that the Government demanded for those Britons held in Guantanamo.The return to Britain of the Guantanamo four is just the start of the process of re-establishing the international rule of law. The battle cannot be considered won until internment without trial and the use of torture to extract information are stamped out – everywhere.. We now learn that he is willing to accept evidence collected through torture so long as it is done outside the US. We can only assume that the lessons of Abu Ghraib remain unlearnt by the Bush administration.Mr Bush’s nomination of Alberto Gonzales for the vacant position of Attorney General is further confirmation of this disturbing fact. This is a man who has described the sections of the Geneva Conventions dealing with the treatment of prisoners of war as “obsolete” and “quaint”. Plans are underway to open US jails in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen to interrogate terror suspects. This will guarantee there will be no inconvenient scrutiny by the Red Cross.