Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday attacked British emergency internment laws, introduced in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, as a "perversion of justice".

"This legislation has created a Guantanamo Bay in our own backyard," Kate Allen, Amnesty's director for Britain, told the Independent newspaper, referring to the US military base in Cuba.

In a hard-hitting report, Amnesty said that the emergency legislation adopted by Britain had created a "shadow" criminal justice system for foreigners suspected of being "terrorists".

By allowing foreign nationals to be locked up indefinitely without charge or trial, the government had failed to meet international standards, Amnesty claimed.

Its report, entitled "UK: Justice Perverted under the Antiterrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001", examined the laws that have led to 14 people being detained at high-security prisons.

Six of the terrorist suspects will have been in detention for two years on December 19, said Amnesty.

"The Act is discriminatory -there is one set of rules for British citizens and another for nationals of other countries," the group claimed.

"If there is sufficient evidence to warrant holding these individuals indefinitely they should be charged and tried in proceedings which meet international fair trial standards. Otherwise they should be released."

Amnesty also had misgivings about the workings of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which was set up to allow the men to appeal against

their detention.

Amnesty said the commission appeared to have accepted evidence obtained through the torture of suspects detained by the US at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.

"By indicating that they are prepared to rely on evidence extracted under torture, the UK legal process has effectively given a green light to torturers," the rights group charged.

Guantanamo Bay is the site where more than 660 people picked up during the US "war on terror" are being held. The United States does not consider them prisoners of war and is holding them indefinitely without setting trial dates.

Meanwhile, Britain's prison service has admitted that its officers subjected jail inmates to sustained beatings, mock executions, death threats and racist abuse, the Guardian newspaper reported yesterday.

Fourteen prisoners were seriously assaulted by officers in Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London, the Guardian said, in what it described as the biggest abuse scandal in a British jail in modern times.

The left-wing daily said it had seen court documents in which the prison service admitted that the detainees suffered at least 122 separate instances of assault between 1995 and 1999.

The Prison Service had also settled a further 32 cases without admitting the prisoners' claims of violence were true, the newspaper said.

It reported that in one of the worst incidents, an Irish inmate was pinned on a bed and choked as eight officers beat him, with one shouting for the victim to call him "English master".