Human Rights Watch notes that European leaders will sit down with President Donald Trump at the NATO summit
in Brussels on Thursday. [5/25] High on the agenda will be how the new
US administration and its European partners cooperate on
counterterrorism. That conversation should include how to ensure that
torture has no place in counterterrorism efforts.
The NATO treaty played a little-known role in the dark history of
post-9/11 US-Europe counterterrorism cooperation that permitted CIA
secret detention and torture on European soil.
The day after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration invoked the “collective self-defence” clause in
Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Within a month, Europe’s leaders had
agreed to give the US military and intelligence agencies “blanket overflight clearance” and unlimited use of airports for refueling.
A Swiss senator who later
investigated
the programme for the Council of Europe was never allowed to see that
agreement, but he concluded that Europe’s approach had been “permissive”
and that the arrangement facilitated CIA covert operations.
Why bring all this up now? We are now in a world in which European
leaders have to talk about a shared approach to counterterrorism policy
with a US president who
promised during his election campaign to bring back “waterboarding” and “a helluva lot worse.”
The European Court of Human Rights has found in a
series of cases—involving
Macedonia,
Italy and
Poland—that
European intelligence agents enabled the CIA to abduct national
security suspects from Europe, and bundle them onto aircraft to be
tortured elsewhere, or to fly detainees captured elsewhere to secret
detention centres set up in Europe where they were subjected to
terrible, prohibited, abuse. Cases against
Romania and
Lithuania are still open before the court. And two UN Committees have condemned
Sweden for its role in the rendition of two Egyptian asylum-seekers in 2001.
The European governments involved have done little or nothing to hold those responsible to account.
Italy has gone furthest,
convicting Italian and US agents, the latter
in absentia,
for kidnapping a man who was sent to Egypt and tortured, but some of
those deemed criminally responsible have since received a presidential
pardon. Every other criminal investigation in Europe into European
complicity – in Poland, Lithuania and the
UK – is stalled or has been shelved.
The UK government has
shelved
the work of a judicial inquiry into allegations of complicity in
rendition and torture, and instead handed over the task to a
parliamentary committee that lacks necessary independence.
Successive investigations into European complicity by the
Council of Europe and
European Parliament
faced obstruction from most of the governments under investigation.
None of the bilateral deals between the US and each individual European
state involved in these abuses has ever seen the light of day. We still
don’t know who in Europe authorised them.
Days after Trump’s inauguration, newspapers published a
leaked draft Executive Order
suggesting that the new US president was considering reopening the
CIA’s high value detainee programme. A White House spokesman said that
the draft order was “
not a White House document.”
Those plans – thankfully – seem to be on the back burner. But the
risk of a return to torture lingers, particularly if a new attack took
place and altered the president’s thinking.
Some European leaders have already signalled that if the US resumes
abusive security practices it would hurt relations. The German defence
minister has stated clearly that there is “
no room for torture” in US-German relations. UK Prime Minister Theresa May has said that the
UK’s ability to cooperate on intelligence matters with a state that practised torture would be limited. Donald Tusk, EU Council president, listed “
worrying declarations by the new American administration” as one of the key external threats to the EU.
It is vital for European leaders continue to make clear to the Trump
administration that there would be negative consequences if Washington
resumed secret detention, rendition and torture. Even if the goal of
such a programme is to outsource torture to repressive regimes elsewhere
and never touch down at a European airport, Europe’s leaders should be
no less vociferous in their objection to such illegality.
NATO’s
founding charter
says that its members are “determined to safeguard the freedom, common
heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of
democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
As they begin their relationship with a new US administration,
European states should be clear that the shared values of the alliance
preclude intelligence and security cooperation that would lead to
renewed torture and secret detention. And they should come clean about
their own role in CIA torture in the past.
Note EU-Digest: before we start accusing other countries about their poor Human Rights behavior it might be worthwhile to look how well we in the West are doing ourselves when it comes to Human Rights. After all “What's good for the goose should also be good for the gander.”
EU-Digest
