February 11, 2007	Sunday	Muharram 22, 1428

ROME: Several European countries may soon be asked to explain their “passivity” over illegal renditions by the CIA through European airspace between 2001 and 2005.

Governments of member countries found at fault by the European Parliament could face serious consequences, including suspension of their EU voting rights.

The warning follows investigations by a special parliamentary committee appointed by the European Parliament in 2005 to investigate cases of prisoner renditions and to impose sanctions on EU member states that violated human rights by colluding with the CIA.

The committee was established following allegations that after the Sep 11 attacks the CIA started secretly to move Al Qaeda suspects through the EU to countries known to practise torture. This became infamous as a process of “renditions”.

The parliament committee also investigated allegations that EU member states hosted secret US detention centres.

The report will be debated and put to a plenary vote at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Feb 14.

The countries involved include Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Denmark, Turkey, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bosnia and Romania.

More than a thousand CIA-operated flights were operated through European airspace 2001-2005, and secret detention facilities “may have been located at US military bases” in Europe, said the committee in its report.

The report says European countries have been “turning a blind eye” to flights operated by the CIA which “on some occasions, were being used for extraordinary rendition or the illegal transportation of detainees.”

Giovanni Claudio Fava, who chaired the committee, said that on the basis of what the ad hoc commission found after 12 months of hearings and research, the EU Council, the political body of the bloc, should order an independent investigation and “where necessary, impose sanctions on member states in case of serious and persistent violations.”

The committee said it rejects extraordinary renditions “as an illegal instrument used by the US in the fight against terrorism”, and condemns the “acceptance and concealing of the practice, on several occasions, by the secret services and governmental authorities of certain European countries.”

“It has been hard work, both from a professional and emotional point of view,” Fava said. “We investigated 21 well-documented cases of extraordinary rendition, we talked with the victims directly, who testified to the committee. We listened to their sorrowful stories; we collected 200 interviews, and hundreds of hours of recordings.”

The report notes that most cases of renditions investigated by the committee involved “incommunicado detention and torture during interrogations as was confirmed by the victims or their lawyers.” The report laments “the lack of cooperation of many member states and of the Council of the EU towards the temporary committee”, and says “the serious lack of concrete answers to the questions raised by victims, NGOs, media and parliamentarians has only strengthened the validity of already well-documented allegations.”

The European Council, the report says, initially withheld, and then provided only partial fragments of information pertaining to discussions with high-level US officials.

The report says Italy, Austria, Poland, Portugal and Britain were particularly uncooperative with the investigations.

Human rights groups have focused on Poland and Romania as likely locations for US secret prisons in the EU. But the report says “it is not possible to acknowledge that secret detention centres were based in Poland.”

“I expect the plenary session of the European Parliament will ratify our report,” Fava said. “We denounced all governments’ direct and indirect responsibilities in these illegitimate practices, which violate human rights and law as well.”

“Our responsibility is now to assure that fundamental rights — like having a lawyer, calling the embassy, knowing what the person is charged with, being processed and judged without being tortured — are guaranteed to all, even to those accused of the worst crimes,” Fava added.

Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees fair trial before an independent tribunal, and says suspects are innocent until proved guilty.

Fava said that the main achievement of the report from a political point of view is that it has proved serious lack of vigilance by European countries. “They were convinced that war on terrorism is a US Administration affair, so they simply decided to not hinder its job.”

The report recommends “that national governments and parliaments launch their own independent investigations into what happened, and to immediately seek the return of their citizens and residents who are being held illegally by US authorities, and compensate the innocent victims of extraordinary renditions.”

The countries involved will most likely be asked to compensate victims’ families, Noury said.—Dawn/The IPS News Service