Amnesty urges EU to investigate CIA renditions complicity

Five years after the European Parliament's (EP) first report on CIA renditions, the human rights organisation Amnesty International Tuesday urged European Union countries to make a renewed commitment to investigating their own involvement. EP's committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs is producing a report on EU countries' compliance with an EP resolution requiring them to conduct independent enquiries into their alleged complicity. It is expected that the EP will vote on the report in September. A hearing on this issue is being held at the EP in Brussels today. "New data and information which has come to light over the last five years makes it imperative for EU member states to act", said Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counter-terrorism and human rights in a statement. The EP's 2007 report, led by rapporteur Claudio Fava, faced major opposition in parliament, resulting in virtually no real accountability among EU countries. The statement noted that the fifth anniversary and the new report mark key milestones in the project to unlock the truth about European complicity. "Governments which allegedly colluded with the CIA in illegally transferring, disappearing, and torturing people are required to ensure that an independent, impartial, thorough and effective investigation is carried out into the human rights violations," it stressed. Since the Fava report, the Lithuanian Government has admitted to hosting secret CIA prison and a building in Bucharest has been identified as allegedly hosting a CIA detention centre, and data released in 2009 added to evidence of Polish complicity. Denmark and Finland have been linked to Lithuania in recent releases of rendition flight. A proposed British enquiry was abruptly halted in 2011 pending the outcome of a criminal investigation into British complicity in CIA renditions to Libya. "There's an appalling lack of political will to secure the truth. How can the EU, which portrays itself as a human rights standard-bearer, presume to tell other government, notably those involved in the Arab Spring, how important human rights are when it steadfastly refuses to investigate its own alleged complicity in torture and disappearance?" said Hall.