The importance of European court's ruling against extraordinary rendition

It's the first time a court has expressly found that the CIA's extraordinary programme constituted torture.

07 Jan 2013 07:22

** Jonathan Hafetz is Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law and the author, most recently, of Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America's New Global Detention System.


In a recent judgment, the Grand Chamber of the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) concluded that German citizen Khaled el-Masri had been subjected to torture, unlawful detention and other abuses in connection with the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme.

The case, El-Masri v The Former Yugolsav Republic of Macedonia, not only represents an important judicial critique of the CIA programme, which led to the enforced disappearance of numerous individuals after 9/11, but also underscores the failure of US courts to provide a remedy for the same human rights violations.

The basic facts of el-Masri's case have previously been described in accounts of the extraordinary rendition programme, including the 2006 Council of Europe report (compiled by Swiss Senator Dick Marty). In brief, el-Masri was seized while travelling by bus across the Serbian-Macedonian border based on suspicion of terrorism.

Macedonian officials took el-Masri to a hotel in Skopje, where they subjected him to abuse - including holding a gun to his head - during three weeks of incommunicado interrogation. El-Masri was then handed over to a CIA rendition team, who stripped, beat and sodomised him with a suppository before flying him - hooded and shackled - to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit.

in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/20131595119662381.html