By Terance Walsh
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

WARSAW, Poland — Polish prosecutors have filed charges against Poland’s former head of intelligence, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, for his role in CIA torture of al Qaeda suspects on Polish soil.  Prime Minister David Tuck is supporting the ongoing investigation and prosecution and has promised the truth.

The prosecutors charged Siemiatkowski with acting beyond the scope of his powers and violating international law for “unlawful depravation of liberty” and “corporal punishment.”

The investigation over torture in Poland began in 2008.  Although Prime Minister Tusk supports the investigation, he has called for great discretion to assist in finding the truth.  In a news conference Tusk said, “I did not came up with those charges and, if I were in the prosecutors’ shoes, I would not come up with such charges. But maybe I don’t have enough information.”

He added that the investigation “must rise to the highest standards of concern for state interest” and exercise the “utmost discretion.”

Despite Tuck’s skepticism, he remains confident that the investigation is a positive endeavor.  “Poland will never again be a country where politicians, even if they are working hand-in-hand with the world’s most powerful country, can make under-the-table deals.”

A 2006 report from the Council of Europe accused 14 member states of participating in over 1,000 CIA flights across European territory.

Since 2007 the Council of Europe has expressed concern over allegation that al Qaeda suspects were being detained in secret prisons in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.  All three countries have denied the existence of any such prisons.

Additionally, former U.S. CIA officials have stated that the U.S. used secret prisons in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania to detain al Qaeda suspects.

Polish campaigners have found evidence of the secret prisons after compiling records of CIA planes that landed in Szymany, a Polish military base, in 2002 and 2003.  One of the planes is said to have been carrying Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-identified 9/11 mastermind who now faces a United States military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.  Mohammed himself says he was detained in Poland for a period.

According to the campaigners the secret prison was located in Kiejkuty.

Terror suspect Abu Zubaydah also claims that he was tortured in CIA prisons in several countries, including Poland.  Polish officials have given Zubaydah “victim” status over the course of the investigation.

Human rights groups have applauded the initiative Poland has taken in prosecuting Siemiatkowski.  “Poland deserves credit for this step, as the first European state to begin to deal with CIA torture on its own soil,” said Reprieve, a London based group.  Reprieve also encouranged Romania and Lithuania to follow Poland’s example.

“Every state that has signed the (United Nations’) Convention Against Torture has an obligation not just to prevent torture but to hold accountable officials who authorize or facilitate it,” said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I suppose it may be true that the Polish secret service was making a base available and then was not really engaged in what was going on there,” said Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights.  “But for such an operation to go ahead smoothly various units must coordinate their actions and have approval from politicians at the highest level. Any intelligence head would not make such a decision alone,”

In addition to the UN regulations, Poland has provisions in its constitution that ban torture and imprisonment without consent of the courts.  Politicians and officials who violate this provision are subject to prosecution in the courts.

Poland has been one of the United States’ staunchest allies throughout the course of the “War on Terror.”  It has taken part in American missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. does not deny that it has flown prisoners to stations all over the world but it denies the use of torture in those prisons.

There also remain questions about how much Leszek Miller, the Polish Prime Minister in at the time the alleged detentions occurred, knew about the secret prisons.  There is, however, evidence that Miller was aware of the prisons and could face charges for allowing the prisons to operate on Polish soil.

The Polish prosecutor’s office has declined any comment on the matter.

For more information please see:

Adelaide — Light Shines On CIA “Black Site” — 30 March 2012

Huffington Post — PM: Poland Is “Victim” Of US Leaks On CIA Prison — 30 March 2012

BBC — Polish PM Promises Truth On CIA Rendition Of Prisoners — 29 March 2012

Reuters — Polish PM Urges “Discretion” Around CIA Prison Probe — 29 March 2012

Reuters — Human Rights Groups Welcome Reports On CIA Prisons — 28 March 2012

PolskieRadio — Former Polish Intelligence Chief Charged In CIA “Black Sites” Case — 27 March 2012

By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MOSCOW, Russia–The Obama Administration is seeking to repeal a 1974 law, called the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which currently restricts “normal trading relations with communist countries” and also permits mass emigration from the Soviet Union, despite having helped thousands of people escape the Kremlin’s repression, join their relatives abroad, or to leave behind inhuman living conditions.

The United States Chamber of Commerce has called the repeal its “top priority” for this year claiming that, when Russia joins the World Trade Organization, the country will be opened to a world of international trade. Continuing to prohibit the United States to trade with Russia could put American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

On the other hand, the law has had little “practical effect since 1994,” because the United States generally “waives” its application. Even still, lawmakers who are critical of Russia’s human rights record have resisted repeal and politicians in Washington D.C., Democrats and Republicans alike (including Sen. John McCain), have sought to enact a separate law—which they named the Magnitsky Act. The proposed law would put travel bans and freeze assets on Russian’s suspected of human rights violations, namely those who contributed to the death of Russian tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky.

The Bill’s latest endorser, Republican Senator Dick Lugar stated during a Press Release on March 27, 2012 that, “this bill has been pending before the Foreign Relations Committee for nearly a year, and we held a hearing on the bill last December. My office has worked with Senator Cardin’s staff to develop a revised version of the bill, which I strongly support.  Therefore, I would look forward to the opportunity for the Committee to consider this legislation at the next business meeting.”

Unfortunately, the Obama administration does not like the proposed law because it threatens United States/Kremlin relations—a bond which the President has worked hard to repair. Moreover, the Kremlin dislike the proposed law because it exposes—on an international level—Putin’s criminal regime.

Despite the important relation that the President has built with Russia, the Magnitsky Act calls for the rehabilitation of human rights in Russia and would require the United States to settle for nothing less. The law is named for Magnitsky, the Russian tax attorney, who suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of Russian authorities as a byproduct of a political brawl. The circumstances surrounding Magnitsky’s death have been vague and elusive from the beginning, though this much is clear: Magnitsky testified against the Russian Interior Ministry (a governmental agency responsible for policing, national security and investigation economic crimes, like tax invasion), stating that they used his employer, Hermitage Capital, to embezzle $230 million from the Russian treasury by filing false corporate tax returns. After testifying against the Interior Ministry, Magnitsky was detained beginning in 2008 “on suspicion of helping Hermitage Capital evade $17.4 million dollars in taxes.”

A year after being detained, Magnitsky died. As the Wall Street Journal describes,  prisoners in Russia are kept in “freezing and overcrowded cells, grotesque sanitation, and larvae-infested food.” Government officials iterated that Magnitsky’s death came as a result of heart disease and active hepatitis. Appropriate medical care would have allowed for the diagnosis and treatment of the diseases before he become fatally ill; nevertheless, on the day of his death he received no such medical treatment.

Magnitsky’s death has sparked incredible outrage throughout the world. In fact, on Russia’s “Google” equivalent—Yandex.ru—there are 19,000 articles on Magnitsky. According to Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, this signifies that “middle-class Russians, whom Magnitsky typified, finally realize they are no longer immune to the everyday official thuggery routinely meted to Russians outside the privileged belts of Moscow and St. Petersburg.”

Despite the international outrage, and the growing concern that Russia continues to violate their citizen’s basic human rights, the Obama Administration has been slow to speak out against Magnitsky’s death; however, historian Alexander Goldfarb said, as quoted in The Moscow Times, that “when Russian citizen’s are once again compelled to go out onto the square and defend their rights, keeping the Jackson-Vanik Amendment is the best way the United States can support them.” Perhaps one day, so will the Magnitsky Act.

For more information please visit:

Wall Street Journal–Russia’s Steve Biko–27 March 2012

 

 

By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MUNICH, Germany–Convicted Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, died on Saturday in a German nursing home. He was 91 years old and suffered from terminal bone marrow disease and other illnesses.

In 1977, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel from the United States, where he had been employed in Ohio as a mechanic with Ford Motor Corporation. In Israel, he was accused of and put on trial for being “Ivan the Terrible,” an “infamous Ukrainian guard” at Treblinka Extermination Camp. According to the Telegraph, “even in Treblinka, where beatings, gassing and torture were part of the daily routine, ‘Ivan the Terrible’ stood out for his perverse sadism’” and was allegedly responsible for putting 800,000 prisoners to their death.

After a lengthy trial, Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity; he was thereafter sentenced to death in April 1988. However, the sentence was overturned five years later on appeal. The court determined that “new evidence threw sufficient doubt on whether Demjanjuk was, in fact, Ivan the Terrible.” In 1993, Israel ordered Demjanjuk back to the United States.

The United States reinstated Demjanjuk’s citizenship in 1998, but it was again revoked in 2002 after “mounting evidence,” suggested that Demjanjuk had served as a guard in Sobibor death camp where more than 27,000 people died during World War II. This evidence, the U.S. government claimed, had been omitted from Demjanjuk’s immigration papers and concealed from United States officials when Demjanjuk immigrated to the country in 1952. Thus, in 2009, he was again extradited, this time to Germany, where he faced yet another war crimes trial.

In May 2011, after eighteen months of trial, the Munich court convicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder between March and September of 1943—one count for each person who died during his time at the camp.

The court said that although there is no doubt that Demjanjuk had been a prisoner of war, there was also “clear evidence” that Demjanjuk had volunteered to serve with the notorious German army and participated in the “Nazi killing machine that slaughtered 6 million Jews and undesirables.”

Interestingly, there was, according to the Huffington Post, no evidence that Demjanjuk had committed any specific crime. Instead, the prosecution based its case theory on the idea that “if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing.” According to the Huffington Post, it was the first time that such a legal argument had been made in Germany. Furthermore, according to Thomas Walther, a lead investigator who prompted Demjanjuk’s prosecution, this verdict could open the door to the prosecution of other “low-ranking Nazi helpers.”

A key piece of evidence to the prosecution’s case was an SS identity card, which “allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.” Court experts claimed the card is genuine while the defense insisted that it was “a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.”

Though sentenced to five years imprisonment, the presiding judge had ordered that Demjanjuk be freed during the appeal process, noting that he was not “a flight risk because of his advanced age, poor health and the fact that [he was] deported from the U.S. two years ago, [and] is stateless.” Demjanjuk was not, however, to leave Germany.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk always denied his presence at any death camp and participation in the Nazi’s atrocities. Instead, he claimed that after having been drafted into the Soviet Red Army, he fell into the hands of German combatants in May 1942 and was thereafter “recruited to work as a guard in exchange for escaping the camps himself.”

After is May 2011 conviction, Demjanjuk told the German judges presiding over his trial, “I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans. Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope.”

Demjanjuk’s son, John Jr., has accused German prosecutors of ignoring the facts. “My dad,” he said in an email to the Associated Press at the time of the 2011 verdict, “is a survivor of the genocide famine in Ukraine, of the war fighting the Nazis, of the Nazi POW camps…and now of Germany’s attempt to finish the job left unfinished by Hitler’s real henchmen.”

Demjanjuk is survived by his wife Vera, his son John Jr., and two daughters Irene and Lydia.

For mor information, please visit:

MSNBC World News–Nazi War Criminal John Demjanjuk Dies at 91–17 March 2012

The Telegraph–John Demjanjuk–17 March 2012

By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MOSCOW, Russia–On March 6, 2012 the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow heard a lawsuit filed by Ivan Cherkasov, a Hermitage Capital executive based in London, England, against the Russian Interior Ministry. The lawsuit challenges a fairly new law, enacted in April 2010, which allocates power to the Interior Russian Ministry to “arbitrarily deny any person the right to leave the country.”

In September of 2011, Cherkasov, a colleague of the late Sergei Magnitsky, applied for a new passport through the Russian Embassy in London. The Embassy thereafter denied his application in December “on orders from the Russian Interior Ministry,” but refused to provide any further detail. Last week, however, the Embassy stated that Cherkasov’s request for a renewed passport had been denied based on paragraph 3 of Article 15 of the Russian Federal law entitled “On Procedure of Exit and Entry to the Russian Federation.”

The law provides that, “the right of citizens of the Russian Federation to leave the Russian Federation may be temporarily restricted in cases where the citizen is suspected or involved as a defendant, and for as long as the decision is made on the case or the court verdict comes into force.”

Denying Cherkasov’s request for a new passport appears to be yet another glimpse into the corrupt workings of the Russian government and the latest twist in a tax rebate fraud case. In May 2007, the Russian Secret Police and the Russian Interior Ministry began a “fabricated criminal case” against Cherkasov as a means to “gain access to” Hermitage Fund’s documents and files and then to steal $230 million of taxes that Hermitage had paid the year prior. The tax rebate fraud was exposed by an attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, who gave “sworn testimony against the officials involved.” Magnitsky was  then arrested and detained; he died a year later at the hands of abusive Russian authorities. Cherkasov’s case has remained open for the past five years, thus allegedly falling within the bounds of the above-stated law.

As Cherkasov points out, he left Russia six years ago and has, since that time, lived abroad. “By refusing to issue me a passport of a citizen of Russian, the Russian Interior Ministry in fact denies me Russian citizen and denies me the right to emigrate.”

Cherkasov claims that, “with the new law in place, anyone who is being persecuted by the authorities no longer has the freedom to emigrate. The constitutional right of citizens of Russia to freedom of movement is left at the mercy of corrupt law enforcement officers.”  Indeed, restricting one’s ability to emigrate has been method exercised by such totalitarian regimes under both Mussolini between 1922 and 1943 and Hitler from 1933 to 1945.

For more information, please visit:

Impunity Watch—UK Parliament Calls for Sanctions on Russia For Magnitsky Death—9 March 2012

Law and Order in Russia–Magnitsky’s Colleague Challenges Russia’s New Restriction on Emigration—6 March 2012

Impunity Watch—Deceased Russian Whistleblower to be Tried Posthumously—12 Feb. 2012