By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

BRUSSELS, Belgium – On September 1, Thomas Hammarberg, the Swedish Diplomat and Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, released a statement condemning European nations for aiding and committing countless crimes against humanity over the past ten years in collaboration with the United States and its War on Terror.

He accused several EU nations, including Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and Britain for permitting, protecting and participating in the United States’s Central Intelligence Agency’s (“CIA”) Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program (“RDI”), which has deeply violated the systems of justice and human rights protection.  There is “no doubt,” Hammarberg said, “that all 3 elements of this program have entailed systematic violations of human rights.”

For example, in June 2006, the Council of Europe released a report discussing the “unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees” by European nations bound by the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture. The report claimed that the United States had operated under the precept that combating terrorism was outside the scope of issues governed by international criminal laws and the Geneva Convention. Using new terminology and concepts like “enemy combatant” and “rendition,” the United States, with the help of European counterparts, was thereby able to generate a “spider’s web” of disappearances, secret detentions, and otherwise illegal inter-state transfers of detainees that run contrary to international principals of human rights.

The report determined that the spider’s web has included a “world-wide network of secret detentions on CIA ‘black cites’ and in military or naval installations.” Furthermore, some Council of Europe member States “knowingly colluded with the United States to carry out these unlawful operations” while some “tolerated them or simply turned a blind eye.” Regardless of the type of participation, “all involved nations have gone to great lengths to ensure that such operations remain secret and protected from effective national or international security.”

Being held at the “black cites,” kept the suspects “outside the reach of any justice system and rendered them vulnerable to ill-treatment,” said Hammarberg. The February 14, 2007 report issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, details, in great depth, the treatment of “high value detainees” held by the CIA. Specifically, when initially captured, high value detainees were photographed with and without clothing, subjected to evasive body cavity checks (including rectal examinations), and thereafter shackled and blindfolded — in some instances so tightly that severe wounds resulted.

Hammarberg said that European governments were “deeply complicit” in U.S. counterterrorism strategies, including the pervasive torture techniques meant to coerce cooperation during interrogations. Often, detainees were not permitted to use the toilet and in some circumstances were forced to urinate or defecate into a diaper or on themselves.  Interrogation methods included suffocation by water, prolonged stress standing (naked, with arms extended and chained above one’s head for two to three days at a time), beating and kicking, confinement in a box, which severely restricted movement, prolonged nudity, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold temperatures, and starvation.

As Hammarberg noted, it is evident that as we approach the ten-year anniversary of the devastating 9/11 attacks it is important to pay respect to those who lost their loved ones, but also crucial to reflect and analyze “whether the official responses to the attacks have been proper and effective.” In closing, he iterated that while “Europe has granted effective impunity to those who committed crimes in implementing the rendition policy” a “rethink is required to prevent this misjudged and failed counterterrorism approach from having a sad legacy of injustice.”

For more information, please see:

The Huffington Post – Rights Chief Slams EU for Cooperation in U.S. Renditions – 1 September 2011

International Committee of the Red Cross – ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody – 14 February 2007

The Council of Europe – Alleged Secret detentions and un-lawful interstate transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states – 12 June 2006