Finnish UN rapporteur: USA set up extensive system for violating human rights

Many states believed to be involved in activities

Martin Scheinin

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Dr. Martin Scheinin, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, takes aim at a number of governments and intelligence services in a report published on Friday.
      According to the report, the United States has, in connection with its fight against terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, created a system of exceptional interpretations, lengthy and secret detentions, and other practices that violate the prohibition of mistreatment.
      However, Scheinin emphasises that the system would not have been possible without cooperation from several states.
     
According to the report, the intelligence services were involved in many different kinds of exceptional activities at least until May 2007.
      Bosnia, Canada, Croatia, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, Macedonia, Pakistan, and Great Britain have either offered intelligence data or arrested suspects, who have later been subjected to torture.
      The suspects have been moved either to one of the secret prisons of the US Central Intelligence Agency, or to local detention centres in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Thailand, or Uzbekistan.
     
According to the report, it has been established that at least the employees of the Australian, British, and US intelligence services have personally interrogated detainees, who have been tortured by the Pakistani ISI intelligence service in so-called “safe houses”.
      The German and Canadian intelligence services have submitted ready questions to Syrian military intelligence, whose agents have extracted answers by using torture on at least two occasions.
      In addition, several countries have sent their own interrogators to US detention centres in Guantánamo. In addition to Bahrain, China, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan, the same has been done by at least Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Britain.
     
Britain appears in the report as a country that has very powerfully supported torture: British intelligence officials have been involved in more than 2,000 interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo. However, neither Britain nor other European countries are accused of directly taking part in torture.
      “No, there is nothing like that”, Scheinin says by telephone from Florence, where he works at the European University Institute. “I am trying here, on the basis of the law, to indicate that there cannot be a very big difference between torturing and looking on while others torture.”
     
Scheinin feels that countries that are taking part in the war against terror, and their governments, bear primary responsibility for what has happened. What the victims may have done should not be a determining factor in his view. He does not believe that a special international court is needed in clearing up the matter.
      “In principle there is, naturally, an international criminal court for the most serious cases”, Sheinin points out. “But the United States, for example, is not involved in it, so it is not a very realistic option."
     
Sheinin does not expect that there will be an extensive series of international trials on the matter.
      “The processes do not have to be extensive, as long as they go deep enough”, Shcheinin says. “A few cases to show that the rule of law exists, is important. On the one hand there is the question of those who have directly taken part in torture, and on the other hand, there are those who have given the actual operative orders.”
      So how far up the chain of command is it necessary to go? Will former US President George W. Bush face charges?
      “Well, if Vice President Dick Cheney were called in, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales”, Sheinin says. “That would be about the right level."


Links:
  Another source for the report
  Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin

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