Summary: The European Court of Human Rights shows America that the love of justice still lives there, finding Macedonia guilty of the crime of cooperating with CIA crimes. Slowly what was a city on a hill (Matthew 5:14) sinks into the mud. Slowly our global leadership erodes, leaving just another military power (funded by loans from Japan and China).
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Content
- Summary of the case
- The Court’s ruling
- America responds: secrets trump justice
- More about this episode of our history
- For More Information about justice in America
This is another in a series of posts about the death of justice in America. Links to the others appear at the end.
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(1) Summary of the case
From “Torturing the Wrong Man“, Amy Davidson,
The New Yorker, 13 December 2012
A judgment issued on Thursday by the European Court of Human Rights contains an account of the treatment of a man who, after some detective work by a foreign police force, was handed over to the CIA as suspected member of Al Qaeda …
Why would someone with such dangerous connections be released? What about the information he might have that could unravel some devious plot?
The answer is simple: after a couple of months, the C.I.A. figured out that they had picked up not a shadowy terrorist but a car salesman from Bavaria who happened to have a similar name. Even then, they kept him prisoner for several weeks while trying to figure out their next move. There is now no dispute that this was a case of simple mistaken identity.
(2) The ruling
Excerpt from a Decision by the European Court of Human Rights, 13 December 2012:
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In today’s Grand Chamber judgment in the case of El-Masri v. “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, which is final, the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been:
- a violation of Article 3 (prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights on account of the inhuman and degrading treatment to which Mr El-Masri was subjected while being held in a hotel in Skopje, on account of his treatment at Skopje Airport, which amounted to torture, and on account of his transfer into the custody of the United States authorities, thus exposing him to the risk of further treatment contrary to Article 3;
- a violation of Article 3 on account of the failure of “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” to carry out an effective investigation into Mr El-Masri’s allegations of ill-treatment;
- violations of Article 5 (right to liberty and security) on account of his detention in the hotel in Skopje for 23 days and of his subsequent captivity in Afghanistan, as well as on account of the failure to carry out an effective investigation into his allegations of arbitrary detention;
- a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life); and,
- a violation of Article 13 (right to an effective remedy).
The case concerned the complaints of a German national of Lebanese origin that he had been a victim of a secret “rendition” operation during which he was arrested, held in isolation, questioned and ill-treated in a Skopje hotel for 23 days, then transferred to CIA agents who brought him to a secret detention facility in Afghanistan, where he was further ill-treated for over four months. The Court found Mr El-Masri’s account to be established beyond reasonable doubt and held that “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the US authorities in the context of an extra-judicial “rendition”.
Principal Facts
The applicant, Khaled El-Masri, a German national of Lebanese origin, was born in 1963 and lives in Ulm (Germany). According to his submissions, having arrived in “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” by bus on 31 December 2003, he was arrested at the border crossing by the Macedonian police. They took him to a hotel in Skopje, where he was kept locked in a room for 23 days and questioned in English, despite his limited proficiency in that language, about his alleged ties with terrorist organisations. His requests to contact the German embassy were refused. At one point, when he stated that he intended to leave, he was threatened with being shot.
On 23 January 2004, Mr El-Masri, handcuffed and blindfolded, was taken to Skopje Airport, where he was severely beaten by disguised men. He was stripped of his clothes, then sodomised with an object and later placed in a nappy and dressed in a tracksuit. Shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation, he was forcibly taken to an aircraft, which was surrounded by Macedonian security agents. When on the plane, he was thrown to the floor, chained down and forcibly tranquilised. According to Mr El- Masri, his treatment before the flight at Skopje Airport, most likely at the hands of a rendition team of the CIA, was remarkably consistent with a subsequently disclosed CIA document describing so-called “capture shock” treatment.
Mr El-Masri was flown to{Afghanistan}. According to his submissions, he was kept for over 4 months in a small, dirty, dark concrete cell in a brick factory near Kabul, where he was repeatedly interrogated and was beaten, kicked and threatened. His repeated requests to meet with a representative of the German Government were ignored. During his confinement, in March 2004, Mr El-Masri started a hunger strike to protest about being kept in detention without charges. In April, 37 days into his hunger strike, he claims that he was force-fed through a tube, which made him severely ill and bedridden for several days. In May 2004, he allegedly started a second hunger strike.
On 28 May 2004, he was taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, by plane to Albania and subsequently to Germany. Mr El-Masri then weighed about 18 kilos less than a few months earlier when he had left Germany. Immediately after his return to Germany, he contacted a lawyer and has brought several legal actions since. In 2004, an investigation was opened in Germany into his allegations that he had been unlawfully abducted, detained and abused. In January 2007, the Munich public prosecutor issued arrest warrants for a number of CIA agents, whose names were not disclosed, on account of their involvement in Mr El-Masri’s alleged rendition.
A claim filed in the United States in December 2005 by the American Civil Liberties Union on Mr El-Masri’s behalf against the former CIA director and certain unknown CIA agents was dismissed. The court decision, which became final with the US Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case in October 2007, stated in particular that the State’s interest in preserving State secrets outweighed Mr El-Masri’s individual interest in justice.
… There have been a number of international inquiries into allegations of “extraordinary renditions” in Europe and the involvement of European Governments, which have referred to Mr El-Masri’s case. In particular, in 2006 and 2007, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, under the rapporteurship of Senator Dick Marty of Switzerland, investigated those allegations. The 2007 Marty Report concluded that Mr El-Masri’s case was “a case of documented rendition” and that the Macedonian Government’s version of events was “utterly untenable”. The report relied in particular on the following evidence: …
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(3) America responds: secrets trump justice
And the Founders wept. “Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit by Man Held in Terror Program“, New York Times, 19 May 2006:
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a man who says he was an innocent victim of the United States government’s program transferring terrorism suspects secretly to other countries for detention and interrogation.
Judge T. S. Ellis 3rd ruled in favor of the Bush administration, which had argued that the “state secrets” privilege provided an absolute bar to the lawsuit against a former CIA director and transportation companies. Judge Ellis said the suit’s going forward, even if the government denied the contentions, would risk an exposure of state secrets.
… US officials have acknowledged the principal elements of Mr. Masri’s account, saying intelligence authorities may have confused him with an operative of Al Qaeda with a similar name. The officials also said he was released in May 2004 on the direct orders of Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, after she learned he had been mistakenly identified as a terrorism suspect.
(4) More about this episode in our history
- “European Court: U.S. Extraordinary Rendition ‘Amounted to Torture’”, Allison Frankel, ACLU, 13 December 2012
- “Arrest All Torturers“, Joe Giambrone, CounterPunch, 18 December 2012 — “Is this a Nation of Laws, or of Unaccountable Men – and Women?”
(5) For More Information
- Sparks of justice still live in America – cherish them and perhaps they’ll spread, 11 September 2009
- Code red! The Constitution is burning., 5 August 2010 — Judges pretend blindness to the hit on Anwar al-Awlaki
- Another American judge weakens the Republic’s foundation, 8 August 2010
- Why should we care about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing strip & cavity searches of prisoners?, 5 April 2012
- Freedom and justice, evicted from America, may have found a new home, 17 August 2012
- The NDAA shows that justice is blind in America, but in a bad way, 9 October 2012
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