The government is bracing itself for thousands of legal claims from people who were imprisoned and allegedly mistreated during the final days of the British empire after the high court in London ruled that three elderly Kenyans detained and tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion have the right to sue for damages.
...
"The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured by the British colony and yet they have been hiding behind technical legal defences for three years in order to avoid any legal responsibility. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care."
Among those who are known to have been watching the case closely are a number of veterans of the Eoka insurgency in Cyprus in the 1950s. One has already met the Mau Mau claimants' lawyers. Any Cypriot claimants would be able to rely not only on the Hanslope Park documentation, but upon the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Those files are kept secret for 40 years, and then opened to public scrutiny. The Red Cross documented hundreds of torture cases in Cyprus, where reporters covering the conflict referred to British interrogators as HMTs – Her Majesty's Torturers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oc ... on-torture
Good luck, in finally receiving some justice, to all those individuals who were "lucky" enough to survive having fallen into the hands of these historically, recent enslavers.
- After these individuals, perhaps the Governments can follow a similar path and seek compensation from Britain for the divisive and unfair legacies it put in place as parting shots; and which still torture the citizens given their "independence".
(Full marks for a more sensible decision from modern Britain.)
