The UK's condemnation of Russia is hypocritical – we're in the assassination business ourselves

As is our wont, the British would like to pretend that we stand above such sordid matters. Just as we (belatedly) condemned Guantánamo, though we don’t actually do anything to help the 41 people who remain there

The attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, resulting additionally in serious injury to both his daughter Yulia and Salisbury Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, is a despicable act. We have now received the good news that they are all recovering but the idea that this is only the second such action by Russia in the UK is risible, since BuzzFeed News has identified fourteen people who have been assassinated on UK soil, almost certainly by the Russians, at a steady rate of one a year.

Whether this has been approved by the president, Vladimir Putin, is surely unworthy of debate: if one Russian went rogue and caused diplomatic embarrassment to the Kremlin, he would have been reined in. By the time they got to the baker’s dozen, heads would have rolled unless the nod had been given.

When I spoke to another potential Putin target in the US recently, he told me that the FBI had advised him not to travel to the UK. The Russians were, the feds thought, unconcerned with the origami paper tiger made up of Theresa May and Boris Johnson. While his jeopardy is real in the US, it is far greater in Britain, since the May government is regarded with derision in Moscow.

Britain’s challenge is, then, much greater than contemplated in the current debate, yet the political bluster in Whitehall obscures the true concern: the people in the Kremlin know that the west cannot complain too loudly, as they are assassinating people themselves.

Sadly, indeed, the Kremlin appears to have overtly used western laws to justify its dreadful practices. On 24 September 2001, the US adopted the “authorisation for use of military force” (the AUMF) which has provided the legal pretext for a policy triad that has jettisoned years of evolving human rights.

The US decided that torture was a good idea, notwithstanding the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture; they opened several law-free prisons, including Guantánamo Bay, despite the 1949 Geneva Conventions; and, while the US has long employed the death penalty, they adopted a policy of assassination, compiling lists of people who were subject to summary execution, without the formality of a trial.

Nobody would pretend that the Russians did not already trample on human rights before any of this happened but, on 6 March 2006, they used the AUMF as a pretext to enact a “federal law on countering terrorism”. Article 22 effectively gives three agencies – the FSB (Federal Security Service), the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) – the authority to kill people who they accuse of committing acts of terrorism. Terrorism being very loosely defined, of course.

As is our wont, the British would like to pretend that we stand above such sordid matters. We (belatedly) deplored American torture (though we were complicit in it, as Ian Cobain demonstrates in Cruel Britannia); we (belatedly) condemned Guantánamo, though we don’t actually do anything to help the 41 people who remain there.

Sad to say, of the terrible American-led triad, the only one May’s government has not yet condemned is assassination, even though it has been illegal since 1758, when Emmerich de Vattel wrote: "I give, then, the name of assassination to treacherous murder...and such an attempt, I say, is infamous and execrable, both in him who executes it and in him who commands it.”

To the contrary, two ministers – Rory Stewart and Gavin Williamson – have recently announced that it is also British policy to kill those we suspect of terrorism, rather than even try to bring them to justice.

In Yemen and Pakistan, UK surveillance intelligence has been provided to US drone pilots to target suspects, sometimes based only on the location of a mobile phone, without even knowing who is holding it at the time. We at Reprieve assist a Yemeni man called Faisal bin Ali Jaber whose uncle and nephew, an anti-extremist preacher and a local law officer respectively, were killed by a US drone strike in 2012. They, like Yulia Skripal and DS Bailey, are parallel proof that, in addition to being immoral, an assassination programme is liable to kill the innocent and even the police.

There is apparently no limit to the right we assert to kill people without trial. For so long as we subscribe to this sordid business ourselves, the Kremlin will inevitably sneer at Boris Johnson’s bluster.

Let us yield to nobody in our condemnation of both assassination and extremism. At the same time, we cannot breach one principle (against assassination) to protect another (the safety of our country). The reasons we should oppose such immoral folly are manifest: we cannot protect what we value by destroying it. Equally, if we sink to the level of those for whom we express distaste, we may as well invite them to assassinate people in Salisbury.

Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of the charity Reprieve and a prominent human rights lawyer