UNITED NATIONS: Six countries — the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Sweden and Kyrgyzstan — have been singled out for violating international human rights conventions by deporting terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Uzbekistan, where they may have been tortured.
The charges, which come at a time when the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is accused of running secret detention centres overseas, have been catalogued in a 15-page UN report presented to the 191-member General Assembly by Manfred Nowak, a special rapporteur on torture.
“Several governments, in the fight against terrorism, have transferred or proposed to return alleged terrorist suspects to countries where they may be at risk of torture or ill-treatment,” says the report titled “Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”.
The study cites Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which says “clearly and unequivocally” that “No State party shall expel, return or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be danger of being subjected to torture.”
The practice of deportation has been strongly criticised by several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But countries such as the United States and Sweden have justified the extradition on the ground that countries receiving the deportees have given “diplomatic assurances that there will be no torture.
But according to Nowak, “diplomatic assurances are unreliable and ineffective in the protection against torture and ill-treatment and such assurances are sought usually from States where the practice of torture is systematic”. He also points out that diplomatic assurances are not legally binding. “Therefore they carry no legal effect and no accountability, if breached, and the person whom the assurances aim to protect has no recourse if the assurances are violated.”
In a separate report titled “Protecting Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism”, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan pointedly says that “while States have the duty to protect their citizens against terrorism, counter-terrorist measures must be in conformity with international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law”.
“The Secretary-General, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and many human rights experts continue to express concern that many counter-terrorism measures are infringing on human rights and fundamental freedoms,” the report warns.
Both UN reports are currently before the General Assembly’s Third Committee dealing with social, humanitarian and cultural issues. Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report, concurs with the arguments by UN officials and human rights experts condemning the deportation of terrorist suspects. “The conclusions of the new UN report and concerns expressed in it strike me as entirely warranted, all the more so because there is concrete and indisputable evidence from recent cases to demonstrate the validity of the report’s conclusions and concerns, as well as evidence that intelligence personnel from the rendering countries play a role in such interrogations and procedures,” he told IPS.
Why are so-called “renditions” employed in the first place? Rabanni asked. “It seems to me that in many, and probably most cases, the reasoning behind them is quite simple: governments in countries resorting to renditions are unable to demonstrate the validity of their claims and suspicions against suspects to the satisfaction of national courts.
The purpose is thus to exploit what is often the tenuous residency status of rendered individuals to permit the courts and security forces in countries of origin to “sort them out” — to use more robust interrogation techniques like physical torture and credible threats against loved ones to extract punishable confessions or apply emergency laws to put them behind bars without the inconvenience of due process, he said.
Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, is particularly critical of the policies of the administration of President George W. Bush — specifically on renditions.
He condemned the “reprehensive policy known euphemistically as ‘extraordinary renditions’” that involve both the “enforced disappearances of persons” and torture, as being “widespread” and “systematic.” Such acts, Boyle told IPS, constitute a “crime against humanity” as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC). “That is precisely why the Bush Jr. administration has done everything humanly possible to sabotage the ICC,” he added.—Dawn/IPS News Service
