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Report fuels fire over flights

Experts say violation of international law hard to prove

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 13th, 2007 issue

A recent report released by the Council of Europe (CE) says U.S. detainees were flown through Prague Ruzyně Airport en route to secret prisons in Poland and Romania where they may have been tortured.
The June 8 document has caused an uproar over the complicity of states, including the Czech Republic, with CIA secret detention centers for so-called high-value detainees.
But proving Czech officials knew about torture at the destinations of planes passing through Prague may prevent international legal action from being taken.
“It is very hard to hold [officials] accountable,” says Chairman League of Human Rights Jiři Kopal. In such a case, when prisoners who may face torture are flown through without staying in a country, “you don’t have any victim, any concrete case.”
Furthermore, says Charles University international law expert Vladimír Balaš, it’s difficult to know whether Czechs had any opportunity to check the contents of such planes.
While he admits the country could have felt pressure from their U.S. ally, “I don’t think that would cause them to neglect” their human rights obligations, he says.
The CE says the report was based in part on “cross-referenced testimonies … of intelligence services in the U.S. and in Europe,” as well as computer analysis of international flight plans.
It shows at least one U.S. detainee, Khaled el-Masri, was flown through Prague in May 2004 between Sarajevo and Iceland’s Keflavik Airport. El-Masri, a German citizen released by U.S. authorities that May, claimed he was sodomized and beaten while in custody.
Such torture is universally banned by European signatories of international human rights conventions, Kopal says.
In November 2005, the CE asked the Czechs to provide information on compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Then Foreign Affairs Minister Cyril Svoboda responded to the request in February 2006, in a letter available on the CE’s Web site.
In it, Svoboda wrote that “there is no knowledge of any facts indicating that, from Jan. 1, 2002, until now, any public officials … have been involved in the unacknowledged deprivation of liberty, or transport of individuals so deprived of their liberty.”
Svoboda refused to comment.
— Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at lvenbrux@praguepost.com


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