'Torture' row stance defended

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In a Commons statement, Mr Miliband defended his decision to ask the High Court to block the release of the material relating to Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002.

In their ruling, the judges complained that they had no choice in the face of a "threat" by the US to review its intelligence-sharing arrangements with Britain if the material was made public.

However, Mr Miliband told MPs that such arrangements depended on "absolute trust" that material passed from one state to another on a confidential basis would not be disclosed.

He said that the intelligence relationship with the US was "vital" to British national security and that his decision had been based on "the clear and unanimous advice" of "all key UK departments and agencies".

"It therefore was - and remains - my judgment that the disclosure of the intelligence documents at issue by order of our courts against the wishes of the US authorities would indeed cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations of this country," he said.

He rejected a call by shadow foreign secretary William Hague to ask Mr Obama's administration to review the decision to block the release of the material which was originally taken under George Bush.

Mr Hague pointed out that the court ruling made clear that the material concerned was not in itself "highly-sensitive, classified United States intelligence".

"Given the change of administration in the US two weeks ago, the changes in policy that have resulted and the changes in personnel in the CIA, would it not be right to put it to the US administration that it could change its approach to this case without fundamentally breaching the principle of which the Foreign Secretary has rightly spoken?" he asked.

However, Mr Miliband told him: "I am not going to join a lobbying campaign against the American government for this decision. It is a decision that they have to make given their knowledge of the full facts in respect of the sources that they depend on and the sources that they do not want to compromise."