Baha Mousa died in a filthy latrine in Basra on 15 September 2003. He had been tortured to death by British soldiers and had suffered 93 different injuries. He and his hotel colleagues were hooded, stressed and deprived of sleep, food and water. The Royal Military Police (RMP) investigation at the time led nowhere. A court martial concluding in April 2007 cleared all soldiers who pleaded not guilty of all charges. Corporal Donald Payne pleaded guilty to the war crime of inhumane treatment. The Baha Mousa inquiry chaired by Sir William Gage is now under way.

On 14 May 2004 there was a firefight in Iraq known as the Battle of Danny Boy. Following the battle, Iraqi families allege that British soldiers took up to 20 Iraqis into a military base and during the night executed them and tortured nine others who heard the sounds of execution. The RMP opened an investigation in June 2004 into the allegations of murder but quickly closed it. When forced to reopen the investigation in October 2007, the RMP again concluded that there was nothing wrong, despite not interviewing seven of the 12 soldiers who were on guard duty that night, when two of those interviewed admitted to breaching the intransgressible rule of having guns with them in the detention centre.

On July 6 2009 the government conceded, in the Al-Sweady judicial review brought by the uncle of a young man killed and five survivors, that there must be a second judicial inquiry into the events of the British occupation of south-east Iraq. On 25 November 2009 the secretary of state for defence announced that Sir Thayne Forbes would chair this inquiry. These and many other cases from Iraq demonstrate that the military system of justice has failed completely.

Thus the UK state has been forced to hold two public judicial inquiries. The Baha Mousa inquiry will report as to the systemic issues underlying the return as standard operating procedure of the five techniques banned by the Heath government in 1972 and held to be illegal by the European Court of Human Rights in 1977. Issues of accountability go to the very top of the military, civil service and political chain of command. In the Al-Sweady inquiry the government faces the certainty that, if anything untoward happened on that night that was subsequently covered up, heads will roll.

There are now 39 similar cases involving the alleged use of coercive interrogation techniques amounting to torture, deliberate use of sexual techniques, illegal detention, rape, sexual assault, executions and deaths in British custody. All focus on the need for the state to hold an independent inquiry.

These most egregious of alleged human rights violations and consequent systemic issues would never have come to light but for the Human Rights Act 1998 and our nation’s strong democratic constitution involving judicial review and legal aid.The Strasbourg Court has read into the protections of articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life and the absolute prohibition on torture) – that if the state might be implicated in violations of either article it must hold an independent and effective inquiry which allows lessons to be learned. The inquiries under way reflect this procedural duty. This is of immense constitutional importance.

I want to sound a dire warning to all who are remotely concerned with any of the issues touched upon here. A recently published joint Ministry of Justice/Legal Services Commission consultation paper proposes removing all legal aid for non-residents. If this happens, though the House of Lords has found that the Human Rights Act 1998 did have extra-territorial effect in occupied Iraq, such findings will have no practical impact. Impecunious Iraqis could never afford to pay privately for judicial reviews and these most serious of alleged human rights abuses would remain uncovered. Phil Shiner is a human rights lawyer and head of Public Interest Lawyers