DTI admits agreeing export of shock batons

A minister in the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) admitted that the department had issued a trans-shipment licence in 1993, five years after shock batons were banned in Britain.

In 1988, following a spate of armed robberies in which these devices were used, the Firearms Act was revised to prohibit electro-shock devices. Electro-shock batons can be used for crowd control (or animal control) but are so widely used for torture that Amnesty International has described them as the "universal tool of the torturer".

A few weeks earlier, the British government made legal history by apologising in the High Court to a journalist and paying substantial damages. Martyn Gregory, producer of the Channel 4 Dispatches programme The Torture Trail, filed a libel action against the department after Michael Heseltine (at the time trade and industry secretary) described the programme's revelations as "contrived" and "scare-mongering".

The Torture Trail programme, which was largely concerned with uncovering British involvement in the trade in electro-shock equipment, provided a mass of evidence (including written estimates) that companies were prepared to locate and sell such devices. The government denied the programme's revelations, describing them as "contrived" and "scaremongering".

Gregory--who posed as the arms dealer "Frank Davis" for the purposes of the programme--was offered German electro-shock batons for export to a (fictitious) Middle East buyer. A salesman for Royal Ordnance, the former government corporation now owned by British Aerospace, offered to arrange the deal and boasted that he had sold 8,000 similar batons to Saudi Arabia as part of the massive Al-Yamamah arms deal. Frank Stott, managing director of the Scottish manufacturer ICL Technical Plastics also offered electro-shock equipment to the fictitious company.

In a particularly bizarre twist, Gregory was interviewed in June by the Ministry of Defence police, who told him he could face criminal prosecution for "incitement". A prosecution is much less likely after the libel victory and the subsequent admission about licences.