In the course of the last 20 years I have been asked to take on a variety of official national and international commitments. For example, between 2005 and 2010 I sat as a member of a three-person panel appointed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to inquire into whether there was evidence of any official collusion in the death of Billy Wright, a loyalist prisoner who was murdered by three republican prisoners in the Maze Prison. The inquiry was one of several established as part of the Belfast (Good Friday) Peace Agreement (Billy Wright Inquiry Report, 2010). In 2015 I was invited by the Irish Justice Minister to assist the Inspector of Prisons in a review of the organisation of the Irish Prison Service (Inspector of Prisons, 2015). In earlier chapters I have described some of my work with the European CPT in Russia and elsewhere, with the United Nations in Cambodia and before the IACHR in Costa Rica. One unanticipated and unique piece of international work was the contribution I was asked to make in setting up and overseeing what became known as the Jericho Monitoring Mission.

First request

On the morning of Friday 1 March 2002 while working in my office in King's College London I received an unexpected telephone call from the FCO asking if I would come immediately to King Charles Street for an urgent meeting. When I arrived there an hour later I was told that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had asked if I would be prepared to travel immediately to Tel Aviv and then on to Ramallah to inspect security arrangements in the prison attached to Yasser Arafat's compound, the Mukataa. I learned that there had been discussions at ‘a high governmental level’ about providing a small United Kingdom mission to monitor the detention of five prisoners who were being held by the Palestinian Authority in the Ramallah prison. My task would be to assess whether such a proposal might be feasible. I agreed to take on this assignment and flew that night from London Heathrow to Ben Gurion airport, touching down at 7 am to be met at the steps of the plane and driven directly to the Residence of the UK Ambassador to Israel, Sherard Cowper-Coles.