Europe Rights Court Hears Claims of CIA Torture in Poland
The European Court of Human Rights Tuesday heard claims that Poland had turned a blind eye to the torture of two Guantanamo-bound prisoners of the CIA on its soil.
Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, a 42-year-old Palestinian, and Saudi Arabian national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 48, told the court that Warsaw authorized the U.S. intelligence agency to detain their clients in Poland for several months in 2002-03.
They were repeatedly tortured by waterboarding during that time, the lawyers alleged.
They also alleged that the Polish authorities failed to act when the two men were transferred to Guantanamo in 2003, where they remain a decade later without ever having been put before a judge.
Al-Nashiri's lawyer, Amrit Singh, told the court its intervention was vital to end "impunity".
"CIA interrogators subjected him to torture, to mock execution while he stood naked and hooded before them, to painful stress positions that nearly dislocated his arms from his shoulders and to threats of bringing in his mother and sexually abusing her in front of him," Singh said.
"This court's intervention is now essential for ending impunity," he said.
"This case presents an opportunity for the court to break the conspiracy of silence, to uphold the rule of law."
The court said it would deliver a ruling but did not give a date.
The lawyers argued that Poland failed to uphold its commitments under the European Convention of Human Rights by allowing the two men to be made victims of inhuman or degrading treatment, by allowing them to be illegally deprived of their liberty and by failing to properly investigate the men's treatment.
Poland opened an investigation into the treatment of the two men in 2008 but it has yet to be concluded, a situation that has been condemned by the U.N.'s anti-torture body.
Mikolaj Pietrzak, another lawyer for al-Nashiri, said the Polish state had done nothing for five years and had not cooperated with a probe by a Council of Europe investigator, Swiss politician Dick Marty, into the so-called "war on terror" operations in Europe.
"The only organisation that the Polish state did cooperate with is the Polish state," he said.
Poland is one of a number of European countries that have been accused of assisting the United States in the process of extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the controversial facility at Guantanamo.
Macedonia was condemned by the ECHR in December 2012 over the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin who was arrested in Macedonia at the end of 2003 and transferred to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was held in secret for five months.
The ECHR ordered Macedonia to pay el-Masri 60,000 euros ($81,000) in damages.