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Europe Faces Dilemma on Human Rights
Daniel Dombey and Frances Williams report on yesterday's hard-hitting report on European collusion with American 'rendition' of terror suspects.
DANIEL DOMBEY and FRANCES WILLIAMS
Financial Times
June 8, 2006
Almost five years after the US began its "war on terror" in the wake of September 11 2001, human rights concerns are making it more difficult for European countries to provide Washington with all the support it wants.
A report released yesterday by the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organisation, spells out how at least seven European countries allegedly violated named individuals' human rights by co-operating with the US in matters such as rendition, or extra-legal abduction.
It also seeks to give greater credibility to claims that Poland and Romania hosted CIA secret prisons - an accusation both states deny.
The debate sparked off by the report and the allegations that led to it only serve to illustrate how politically sensitive it has become for European governments to co-operate with the tough US line on battling groups such as al-Qaeda.
With memories of the trauma of September 11 dimming - on one side of the Atlantic, at least - and with popular resentment in many European countries of the US-led war in Iraq, some western officials note that the US now receives less benefit of the doubt from public opinion over the way it conducts its battle against its enemies.
When Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, toured Europe last December in the wake of a Washington Post report on secret prisons, she had to give a series of assurances - including to most of her European counterparts - that the US did not abduct people with the aim of exposing them to torture.
Last month, even Britain, the US's closest ally, called on Washington to close down the special detention centre at GuantanamoBay.
In a recent interview with the FT, Dick Marty, the Swiss politician who compiled the report, said it was not acceptable for European governments to turn a blind eye to US human rights violations in the name of co-operating in the fight against terrorism.
"Europe should say clearly we want to co-operate with the US but without recourse to unlawful methods such as extraordinary renditions and secret detention centres," he said. "I think we can combat terrorism with means that are within the law. If we don't respect the rules, we hand an important victory to the terrorists."
His report is the most comprehensive effort yet to set out European countries' co-operation with possibly illegal US activities.
Many of its findings are based on information that was already available - whether news reports, court filings or public hearings. He also accuses some states after only the most cursory of arguments.
For example, he holds Turkey responsible for violations of human rights because he says an aircraft taking detainees from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Guantanamo "probably" made a stopover at a US airbase at Incirlik in Anatolia.
But Mr Marty's report deals with other cases at much greater length and provides an account, based on European flight data, of what he calls the "rendition circuit", whereby detainees were flown to and from interrogation centres.
He recounts in sometimes appalling detail the indignities, including beatings, cuts and humiliations that some former detainees said they suffered at the hands of US agents or the authorities the US handed them over to - such as Egypt and Syria.
The US has responded vigorously to many of the allegations contained in the report. "The struggle we are in does not fit neatly either into the criminal legal framework, or neatly into the law of war framework," Dan Fried, US assistant secretary of state for Europe, told Mr Marty's inquiry.
But it is not Washington that is the focus of the study. Instead, it is European governments that may now find public opinion and continued scrutiny from the likes of Mr Marty imposing new limits on their co-operation with the US.
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