Home Management Blog

After the liberation in August 2009 from a Scottish prison convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown struggled to distance himself and his government on the decision. “We did not have any role in making the decision on Megrahi’s future,” he said at the time. “It was a matter on which we could not interfere and we had no control over the outcome.”
In a purely legalistic sense, Brown’s statements were accurate: The decision to release Megrahi ultimately belonged to and was carried out by the Scottish Executive led by Alex Salmond and his justice minister, Kenny MacAskill.
But as a cache of documents issued by the Cabinet Office this week makes clear, the remarks of Mr. Brown hid a big deception. Between late 2008 and transferring Megrahi back to Libya, where he remains very much alive more than a year after it was hoped that had died of cancer, the Brown government actively sought and facilitated the release of Megrahi. If there was more brazen in their lobbying on behalf of Libya, it was only because he was playing a more subtle game.
According to the documents, the government gave Edinburgh a “country information” on Libya in December 2008. The briefing to the Scottish Executive said that “Libya has made it clear that if Megrahi were to die in prison this would have serious consequences for relations with the United Kingdom.”
The note continues: “Based on the warnings of ministers on Libya and Libya’s past behavior, it is possible that Megrahi would die in prison from Libya to consider retaliatory measures in the UK.” Exactly what he dreaded the Foreign Office in the UK, we’ll never know. What follows are two-thirds of a page of text obscured, the largest censorship in the 147-page file released Monday. But elsewhere in the Foreign Office wrote that Libya “has given specific instructions that such retaliation would. We evaluate this and the risk of retaliation by Libya as real and as serious consequences.”
The report of the Cabinet Office that came with the files, the Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell Brown absolves the government of having “pressed the Scottish government for transfer or release of Mr. Megrahi,” but it also seems true only in the strictest legal sense. In late 2008, Bill Rammell, the then Minister of State at the Foreign Office said in a memo: “The game plan should be the PTA [Prisoner Transfer Agreement] as a vehicle for transfer in January.”
A few weeks later, another memorandum from the Foreign Office said: “To facilitate direct contact between the Libyans and the Scottish Executive is a key part of our game plan about Megrahi.” And again: “It serves our interests Scottish Minister to raise the bilateral relationship more broadly. A carefully crafted country report and an assessment of risks to the UK’s record of Megrahi meet this requirement without interpreted …. as an attempt to improperly influence future decisions by Scottish ministers. ” And Mr Rammell again in December 2008: “We must ensure that the Scottish government is in a better position to understand the difficulty / sensitivity of this issue.”
As a September 2008 memorandum from the Ministry of Justice said, “It was clear from the beginning [May 2007] Libyan negotiators and government are pushing for the PTA for one reason and ensure the transfer of al-Megrahi Libya. ” And from 2007, the Scottish Executive had insisted that any PTA with Libya explicitly exclude Megrahi because he feared that otherwise, would come under unbearable pressure to grant an application for transfer.
In the early days, the British negotiators insisted on the exclusion of Megrahi. A memorandum of that time the Foreign Office expressed concern that giving in to demands from Libya show that Britain was “susceptible to commercial pressures,” and that would set a bad precedent for future negotiations with Libya and other nations.
But ultimately, the threat that the agreements with British Petroleum and British defense contractors would be revoked overcame the scruples that the Brown government had initially. Over the next two years, the intransigence of the Libyan bowed first to the British government to his will and eventually won the prize they sought – the release of Megrahi.

Random Posts