[JURIST] UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism Ben Emmerson [official profile] on Thursday expressed regret over a US court decision [press release] denying Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [National Security Archive] requests by a member of the UK parliament and the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition [official website]. Earlier this month the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted the US government’s motion to dismiss [opinion, PDF] the FOIA challenge based on a provision of the act that exempts US intelligence agencies from disclosing information to foreign government entities. The court noted that, although it is bound to enforce the provision as it is written, the rule could easily be circumvented by someone who is not a representative of such a foreign entity to retrieve the information and then disclose it to the parliament members, since there is no restriction on what a person does with the information once it is retrieved under the act. Regardless, Emmerson stated that the court’s decision “flies in the face of the principles of best practice for the oversight of intelligence services.” The requests by the UK parliament members were part of an investigation into the US extraordinary rendition program [JURIST news archive], which allegedly allowed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] to extrajudicially capture foreign terrorism suspects for detention and interrogation. Emmerson supports the UK investigation of the program, arguing that the court’s decision was based on a misunderstanding of the UK constitution, in that the All-Party Parliament Group is a separate entity from the UK government, and as such its FOIA requests should have been granted.