THE Human Rights Convention has been signed by every European country.
It specifically outlaws torture, as it most certainly should, and further insists that countries which are signatories to the convention should not collude in torture by third parties.
It is now clear that the US has compromised every country that its so-called rendition flights have touched down in.
The interim report of Council of Europe inquiry head Dick Marty makes this crystal-clear and we can do little better to put it all in perspective than to quote it directly.
As Mr Marty points out: "It cannot be overemphasised that nothing and no-one can justify waiving the principles of the rule of law and respect for human rights and that torture, in addition to being an unreliable way of obtaining information, is in any case absolutely prohibited."
Well, prohibited or not, all the countries of Europe are involved and, as the council points out, "it is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware of the 'rendition' of more than a hundred persons affecting Europe."
In addition to Mr Marty's report, there is clear evidence now emerging that the US has abused its superpower status and influence to establish CIA prisons in Romania and Poland, despite frantic and barely believable denials by Romanian Interior Minister Vasil Blaga.
It is a shattering thought that developed countries colluding with torture could even be contemplated in the 21st century.
It was becoming unthinkable in the latter half of the 20th century, but, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all political restraints on the behaviour of the US have been removed and we are left with the spectacle of the world's greatest military power carrying out - and forcing the complicity of other countries in - acts which all but the most reactionary elements in Britain would consider to be distasteful, immoral and absolutely unforgivable.
And yet it has been left to the Council of Europe to press the case that complicity in the filthy practice of torture should be absolutely rejected by civilised governments.
Our own Labour government, by reason of its being firmly in bed with the US over anything that George W Bush dreams up, is hopelessly tainted by this transatlantic state terrorism.
We ought to be able to trust MPs in the Labour Party to refuse to continue turning a blind eye to these anti-human policies, but, so far at least, it has been left to the tried and tested members of the parliamentary awkward squad to be the only voices raised against our complicity in the suffering of the victims of torture.
All MPs of all parties should and must be made aware that not to oppose the use of torture is to be compromised by it.
If we do not raise our voices and force them to stand up and be counted, who in Britain can consider themselves innocent bystanders, untouched by something so foul that it demeans and pollutes us all?
To have the longest-serving Labour government's legacy to history being the reintroduction of torture is simply not an option that we should have to contemplate.
