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UK ditches plan to bid for Saudi Arabia prisons contract UK ditches plan to bid for £5.9m Saudi Arabia prisons contract
(35 minutes later)
The government has withdrawn a bid for a contract to help run prisons in Saudi Arabia, Downing Street has said. Downing Street has announced that the government is to cancel a £5.9m contract to provide a training programme for prisons in Saudi Arabia.
The decision by David Cameron represents victory for the justice secretary, Michael Gove, who had called for the £5.9m contract to be ditched. 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 prime minister, David Cameron, is also to write to the Saudi authorities to raise the “extremely concerning case” of Karl Andree, the 74-year-old Briton who is facing 350 lashes after being jailed for more than a year for possessing home-made wine. 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.”
More details soon . . . 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.”
A source at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office 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 last 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 Saudi 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.
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.”