EU court condemns Lithuania, Romania over secret CIA prisons

STRASBOURG, France: The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that Lithuania and Romania were complicit in a controversial CIA programme to hold terror suspects in secret detention sites on their territories.

Two suspects now being held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay lodged the case with the court in 2011 and 2012, saying they were illegally held and tortured at CIA "black sites" in Romania and Lithuania from 2004 to 2006.

The court said Romanian authorities knew that Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri would risk torture and the death penalty when it allowed the CIA to hold him at a secret facility in their country from April 2004 to November 2005.

Nashiri is accused of orchestrating maritime terror attacks including the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that left 17 dead. The former Soviet republic of Lithuania was found complicit in hosting a secret CIA prison from February 2005 to March 2006, when it illegally held a top Palestinian operative for Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah.

A 2014 US Senate report found that both Zubaydah and Nashiri -- considered "high-level detainees" -- were subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques" in CIA detention. These included waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

The ECHR found that in both cases the suspects were effectively within the national jurisdictions of Lithuania and Romania. Both countries were therefore "responsible for the violation" of their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The convention explicitly forbids torture and the death penalty. The court ordered Lithuania and Romania to pay 100,000 euros ($117,000) to each complainant. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks the CIA took suspected Al Qaeda detainees to several "black sites" around the world to escape US rules on interrogations -- a programme that has since been judged illegal.

Other punishments inflicted at the CIA sites included intense sleep deprivation, being crammed into coffin-size boxes and "rectal rehydration" to get suspects to talk. The US Senate report did not publicly identify the location of the CIA sites, but the European court had already condemned Poland in 2014 for allowing both Nashiri and Zubaydah to be held at a site there in 2002 and 2003. The ECHR said they based their findings in large part on the US report since they were unable to have access to Nashiri and Zubaydah at Guantanamo.