LABOUR’S shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti is absolutely justified in accusing Britain’s Home Secretary of encouraging “grave human rights abuse” by giving US authorities the green light to execute two British subjects.

Sajid Javid has told US Attorney General Jeff Sessions not only that Britain is not seeking the repatriation of two suspected members of an Islamic State (Isis) murder gang in Iraq and Syria, but that in the event of them being tried in US courts he would not seek Britain’s standard “no death sentence assurance.”

Captured by a Kurdish militia force, the two men stand accused of participating in the cold-blooded killing of British aid workers and US journalists. Nobody with any sense of humanity can be anything other than revolted by such barbaric acts.

Yet revulsion at Isis brutality is hardly the most moral and consistent basis on which to carry out the cold-blooded killing of an Isis death squad.

By Act of Parliament, Britain abolished the death penalty for most capital offences in 1965. This was not only because too many innocent people had already been hanged and capital punishment did little or nothing to deter the commission of murder. 

There was also the widespread view that state organised killing diminishes the right of a society to regard itself as civilised and set the highest moral standard for all its individual members. 

That the US continues to execute dozens of prisoners every year is a stain on its character, as is the death penalty on every other state that retains it. 

But for the US to seek to act as judge and executioner of foreign nationals accused of murder in other countries is breathtaking in its arrogance.

This is true whether or not the two Isis suspects in this case have been stripped of British citizenship. If they have, it deepens Home Secretary Javid’s shameful connivance in undermining Britain’s opposition to judicial killing.

The Isis suspects should either be tried by the appropriate authorities in the countries in which their alleged crimes have been committed or, if that is impractical, they should be tried in Britain in accordance with international protocol. 

In either event, executing the two men if found guilty merely indicates that barbarism has generated yet more barbarism.