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Commission must act on CIA "war on terror" jails
November 14, 2005 12:00 AM
By Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP in The European Parliament
By Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP in The European Parliament
Sarah Ludford, on behalf of the ALDE Group. - Mr President, as Human Rights Watch recalled a year ago, disappearances were a trademark abuse of Latin American military dictatorships in their dirty war on alleged subversion. Now they have become a United States tactic in pursuit of al-Qa'ida.
Illegal detention without charge or trial in Guantanamo Bay or Iraq is bad enough, but secret detention, where people are kept incommunicado with no access to lawyers and at the mercy of mistreatment or torture, is the blackest of black holes. We see the US Congress now seeking to bar claims for habeas corpus and President Bush and his henchmen trying to stifle the McCain Amendment which would ban inhuman treatment of US detainees.
In those circumstances, if a credible newspaper and a credible human rights NGO allege that secret war-on-terror jails exist in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Poland and Romania, what do we do? We all agree that it would be devastating to the EU's reputation and credibility if those allegations were found to be true. Articles 6 and 7 of the EU Treaty stipulate the need to respect human rights and the rule of law.
Commissioner Frattini says there is no evidence, but what has he done to try and find out? When the allegations came out ten days ago, we were told that Member States would be informally questioned, that technical experts from the relevant directorate would be in contact with their counterparts in the 25 Member States, plus 4 candidate countries. Then we learned that such an examination did not amount to an investigation.
I am not impugning the good faith of the Polish and Romanian governments, but we know that secret intelligence services sometimes have their own agenda. I am left with a sense of unease and residual doubt when respected organisations have made allegations, but we cannot honestly say they have been thoroughly investigated. All our mechanisms in the EU for ensuring that human rights standards are respected are frankly inadequate: no peer review, no monitoring, no enforcement. The weakness of your Commission, Mr Frattini, was brought out in your remarks. The precedents are not encouraging. The EU failed to establish a common stance, let alone any joint initiatives, to press the US to release our own citizens from Guantanamo Bay. The US went around Eastern and South Eastern Europe penalising countries with loss of military aid if they refused to sign opt-outs from the International Criminal Court for US personnel. The EU did not offer to pay the difference.
I want you to insist that this matter be put on the agenda of the next General Affairs Council and of the summit in December. This matter needs to be taken up at a political level in order to ensure that the legal guarantees that the EU is meant to offer are fully respected.
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