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EU-RIGHTS-LITHUANIA-ROMANIA
European rights court condemns Lithuania, Romania over secret CIA prisons
STRASBOURG, France, May 31, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – The European Court of Human
Rights ruled Thursday that Lithuania and Romania were complicit in a CIA
programme to hold terror suspects at secret detention sites on their
territories.
Two suspects now being held at the US prison in Guantanamo lodged the case
with the court in 2011 and 2012, saying they were illegally held at the CIA
“black sites” from 2004 to 2006.
In Romania, the court found authorities knew that Saudi national Abd al-
Rahim al-Nashiri would risk torture and the death penalty when it allowed the
CIA to detain him at a facility from April 2004 to November 2005.
Nashiri is accused of orchestrating a2002 attack on the MV Limburg, a
French oil tanker, and the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen that
left 17 dead.
Lithuania was found complicit in hosting a secret CIA prison from February
2005 to March 2006 when it illegally held a top Palestinian Qaeda operative,
Abu Zubaydah.
A 2014 US Senate report found that both Zubaydah and Nashiri were subject
to “enhanced interrogation techniques” in CIA detention, including
waterboarding.
The court found that in both cases, the suspects were effectively within
their national jurisdictions and therefore Lithuania and Romania were
“responsible for the violation” of their rights under the European Convention
on Human Rights.
The convention explicitly forbids torture and the death penalty.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks the CIA took suspected Al
Qaeda detainees to several “black sites” around the world to escape US limits
on interrogations, a programme that has since been judged illegal.
The court also ordered Lithuania and Romania to pay 100,000 euros
($117,000) to each man.
BSS/AFP/RY/1558 hrs