Downing Street has announced that the government is to cancel a £5.9m contract to provide a training programme for prisons in Saudi Arabia.
In a significant victory for the justice secretary, Michael Gove – whose attempts to cancel the project had been resisted by David Cameron and the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond – the prime minister’s spokeswoman said the contract has been cancelled following a review.
The spokeswoman said: “This bid to provide the additional training to Saudi Arabia has been reviewed and the government has decided that it won’t be proceeding with the bid. The review has been ongoing following the decision that was announced earlier in September to close down the Just Solutions International branch of the Ministry of Justice that was providing some of these services.”
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In another significant development, Downing Street also announced that the prime minister is to write to the Saudi authorities to raise his concerns about the case of Karl Andree, the 74-year-old grandfather who is due to face 360 lashes for transporting homemade wine in his car.
The No 10 spokeswoman said: “This is an extremely concerning case. We have been providing consular assistance to Mr Andree and to his family since he was first arrested. We have raised the case repeatedly in recent weeks.
“Given the ongoing concerns and the fact we would like to see more progress, the PM is writing today to the Saudis to further raise the case on the back of action that was already being taken by the Foreign Office and by ministers there.”
Simon Andree (left) with his father Karl Andree who has been threatened with 350 lashes in Saudi Arabia after being caught with home-made wine.Photograph: Andree family/PA
Reacting to Downing Street’s intervention, Andree’s son Simon Andree said: “I’m pleased. It has taken an awful long time. I need to speak with my family.”
He added: “I just hope that the breakdown of this deal won’t affect him. It was never my intention. I hope it won’t impact upon him. This case was always about my father’s health.”
A Foreign Office source said: “Mr Andree has served his sentence and we are urgently seeking his release as soon as possible without the corporal punishment taking place. The UK condemns the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment in all its forms.”
The bid for the £5.9m, six-month contract to design a training programme for Saudi prison officers was put in earlier this year by Justice Solutions International (JSI), the commercial arm of the Ministry of Justice.
This company was set up by the previous justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to sell its expertise in prisons and probation – including in offender management, payment by results, tagging and privatisation – around the world.
In September, Gove announced that he was closing down JSI, telling MPs it was because “of the need to focus departmental resources on domestic priorities”. But, against his own wishes, he had to announce that the Saudi contract bid would go ahead because of the financial penalties involved, but when that reason was amended to Britain’s “best interests” it was widely assumed that Hammond had overruled him.
It has now been confirmed that there was an intense cabinet debate over the issue in July with an exchange of letters between Gove and Hammond, with the justice secretary arguing that human rights concerns should come first and the foreign secretary accusing him of naivety and insisting that “wider interests of the British government” were more important.
Michael Spurr, the chief executive of the national offender management service, told MPs only an hour before the announcement that talks were continuing with the Saudis and they were waiting to see if the bid “came to fruition”. He said the contract involved advising the Saudis on how their prison officers should engage with their prisoners and while it would involve British staff visiting Saudi jails they would not be working in them.
The pressure on Cameron to cancel the Saudi contract escalated when Jeremy Corbyn called on him in his first party conference speech as Labour leader to block the bid to provide training for the very prison system that would carry out the execution of the pro-democracy protester Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr.
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Corbyn responded to the cancellation saying: “David Cameron has been shamed into a U-turn on this terrible contract, but why on earth was it set up in the first place? We should be sending a strong message to repressive regimes that the UK is a beacon for human rights and that this contract bid is unacceptable in the 21st century, and would damage Britain’s standing in the world.”
Kate Higham, caseworker at human rights organisation Reprieve, said the decision to drop the prisons bid could not have come soon enough.
“This deal, if it had gone ahead, would have meant the UK was complicit in the same system that is threatening to execute juveniles Ali al-Nimr and Dawoud al-Marhoon for the ‘crime’ of protesting. Britain’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, however, remains extremely strong. Cancelling the bid has sent a clear message that the UK does not support Saudi Arabia’s gross violations of human rights, and David Cameron must now use this moment of opportunity to prevent the brutal executions of Ali and Dawoud.”
Announcing the decision in response to an urgent question in the Commons, Gove simply said that the issue had been reviewed and a decision taken to withdraw the bid which had been submitted in April.
Stressing that the decision to drop the bid had been a “cross-government” decision, Gove stressed that ministers took human rights questions very seriously, including the protection of the human rights of British citizens abroad.
He emphasised the important work the Foreign Office did in promoting human rights but said it was important to bear in mind that a balance had to be struck between that work and the security interests of the UK.
“There is security cooperation between Britain and Saudi Arabia that has, as the prime minister and others have pointed out, saved British lives in the past.
“And while we would never compromise on our commitment to human rights we must also recognise that it’s in the interests of the most important human right of all, the right to live in safety and security, that we should continue with necessary security cooperation with the Saudi government and with other governments,” he said.
While Gove was roundly congratulated for his victory by Labour, Liberal Democrats SNP and some Conservative MPs, he also found himself facing criticism from those Conservatives such as Alan Duncan who claimed that the decision was driven by the justice secretary’s “caustic view” of the Saudi regime.
Downing Street said the decision was taken because ministers had decided to focus the work of the MoJ on domestic areas. But the move marks a significant change of tack by the prime minister, who defended the contract after Corbyn raised the matter in his conference speech.
Cameron said at the time he would always seek to engage with the Saudi authorities as he said that at least one terror plot had been thwarted on the basis of intelligence provided by Riyadh. This was an echo of arguments used by former prime minister Tony Blair to defend a decision to suspend a Serious Fraud Office investigation into British Aerospace contracts in Saudi Arabia.
The change also marks a major victory for Gove, who will be able to say that he has carried into government his thinking from his book Celsius 7/7. In the book, Gove argued that the world faces an existential threat from extremist ideology, much of which originates in Saudi Arabia.
The prime minister’s spokeswoman said of the change in policy: “As was outlined at the time of the decision to close down, or stop the activities of JSI – that reflected a decision by the government to look at what are the upcoming priorities for the Ministry of Justice and to focus particularly on some of the domestic priorities we want to to do in terms of reforms here. At that stage we were looking at the bid. We were clearly in a process with the Saudis on it.
“Having looked at it further again we have established that we can withdraw at this stage, that there will be no financial penalty and so consequently that decision has been taken and to focus on different priorities. It is a government decision. It was a decision that has been agreed and taken across government.
“We were in the bidding phase [for this contract] and the government, having looked at it further, has established that it can withdraw the bid and that is the right approach given how we want to prioritise the work of the MoJ and what we do. It has been this government’s policy, the policy of previous UK governments to work with other countries to help develop their criminal justice systems, to strengthen their approach to human rights and we remain absolutely committed to doing that. We will continue to engage with the Saudis on those issues.”
Simon Andree (left) with his father Karl Andree who has been threatened with 350 lashes in Saudi Arabia after being caught with home-made wine. Photograph: Andree family/PA
