Yahoo – AFP,
July 24, 2014
Strasbourg (France) (AFP) - Europe's top human rights court condemned Poland on Thursday for hosting secret CIA prisons on its territory, saying Warsaw knowingly abetted unlawful imprisonment and torture of Guantanamo-bound detainees.
European court condemns Poland for hosting secret CIA prisons |
Strasbourg (France) (AFP) - Europe's top human rights court condemned Poland on Thursday for hosting secret CIA prisons on its territory, saying Warsaw knowingly abetted unlawful imprisonment and torture of Guantanamo-bound detainees.
The
European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a Palestinian and a Saudi
national who were held in a US detention centre for several months in Poland in
2002-2003 before being transferred to the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
The Polish
government "enabled the US authorities to subject the applicant to torture
and ill-treatment on its territory", the ECHR said in its rulings over the
cases of Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, 43, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 49, of
Saudia Arabia.
The men's
lawyers had argued before the Strasbourg court that during their detention,
they were repeatedly tortured by waterboarding.
The ECHR
also found Warsaw guilty of allowing the men to be sent to places where they
faced torture, further detention and "flagrant denial of justice".
The
government was ordered to pay 100,000 euros (135,000 dollars) in damages to
each plaintiff.
A decade
later, both men remain at Guantanamo, and have as yet not had a hearing before
a US judge.
Poland has
three months to appeal the decision to the Strasbourg court.
A spokesman
for the foreign ministry told AFP the government had "no comment for the
moment", and that it would prepare a reaction for later on Thursday.
Poland's
president at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was quoted by Polish news agency
PAP as saying, "I respect the verdicts of independent tribunals, but I
will not comment on them."
An
investigation into the detainees' treatment was opened in Poland in 2008 but is
still not concluded -- a situation that has been condemned by the UN's
anti-torture body.
Poland is
one of a number of European countries accused of having assisted the United
States in its extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists from the Middle
East, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Guantanamo, in the wake of the September 11
attacks.
Macedonia
was condemned by the ECHR in December 2012 over the case of Khaled el-Masri, a
German of Lebanese origin who was arrested in Macedonia at the end of 2003 and
transferred to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was held in secret for
five months.
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