over the credibility of a confession, then the jury is likely to disregard the confession. If the defence can show that the confession was made under such duress that most people would make such a confession, then the jury is likely to question the confession's credibility. Usually the more duress that can be shown to have been used by law enforcement by the defence, the less weight most juries will place on confessions. In Britain, partly to protect the individual against police brutality and partly to make confessions credible to a jury, all interviews with a suspect are audio taped on a machine which make two simultaneous copies, one for the police and one for the defendant. In Northern Ireland, where society is more polarised than in the rest of the United Kingdom, which means that allegations of police brutality are perceived by sections of the community to carry more credence, interviews are video taped. It has been alleged that in certain circumstances torture, even though it is illegal, may have been used by some European countries. In "anti-terrorist" campaigns where information is needed for intelligence purposes, and not to obtain a confession for use in court, there is a temptation by the security forces, whether authorised by governments or not, to extract intelligence from alleged terrorists using any means available including the use of torture. Where there is a time component to a crime, for example in a kidnapping case, there is also a temptation for the police to try to extract information by methods which would make the evidence inadmissible in court. Israel has been accused of using torture against Palestinians as early as 1967, and by 1987 torture was generally considered to be permissible under the law. However, there were limitations to who could be tortured. The party being tortured had to be guilty, and it had to be for good reason in order to be tolerated. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that torture was unlawful and that prohibitions against torture were "absolute". Despite this ruling, there are claims that many innocent Palestinians still face torture tactics from Israeli authorities, revealing the difficulty of stopping torture in practice, even after it is no longer considered legal. Debate Proponents Some scholars have argued that the need for information outweighs the moral and ethical arguments against torture. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in an opinion article published in The