Lithuania and Romania complicit, court says
The European Court of Human Rights censured Lithuania and Romania on Thursday for their complicity in the CIA’s secret program of renditions, saying the two European nations had facilitated the ill-treatment and arbitrary detention of two men accused by the United States of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The men — Abu Zubaydah, a stateless man of Palestinian heritage, and Abd al-Rahim Husseyn Muhammad al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent — were at the center of an earlier hearing by the same court in Strasbourg, France.
The court ordered Lithuania to pay Abu Zubaydah — also known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn $152,000, in damages and costs. It also ordered Romania to pay $117,000 in damages to al-Nashiri.
The cases shed light on the murky and once-hidden world of renditions, in which captives suspected of major terrorist acts were shuttled between secret detention facilities and subjected to what Washington labeled “enhanced” interrogation techniques — a phrase taken by rights activists to mean torture and degradation.
The European court has previously ruled, in 2014, that Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri had been subjected to “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment” at a center run by the CIA after they were brought to a prison in northeast Poland. The court ordered the Polish government to make similar payments to the two men.
On Thursday, in separate rulings issued simultaneously, the court said that both had been moved between secret facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere before they were transferred to the United States prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The court said it had been permitted no access to either man because they were both “still being held by the U.S. in very restrictive conditions” at the Guantanamo facility.