Off the wire
• UN chief calls on stakeholders in Togo to ensure peaceful election  • British PM slammed by opposition leader for causing Britain's "biggest loss of influence"  • PepsiCo to introduce aspartame-free Diet Pepsi in U.S.  • Albanian export increases 20.8 pct annually from 2010 to 2014  • LME base metals close higher on Friday  • FTSE 100 close higher on Friday  • Germany's benchmark DAX index rebounds  • Foreign exchange rate of Euro to other currencies  • "We have an inescapable moral duty to help refugees": Angelina Jolie  • S. African president promises maximum protection to foreign nationals  
You are here: 　 Home

PACE President welcomes former Romanian President's CIA secret prison admission

Xinhua, April 25, 2015 Adjust font size:

President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Anne Brasseur, welcomed in a press release on Friday the admission of former Romanian President Ion Iliescu of his knowledge of a secret CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency) prison in Romania.

"In view of Mr. Iliescu's admission, it is now up to the Romanian prosecutorial authorities to conduct a serious investigation into the facts, and to hold to account the perpetrators of any crimes committed in this context," declared President Brasseur.

Mr. Iliescu (in office 1990-1996 and 2000-2004) admitted he knew about a secret CIA facility in an interview with German media outlet Der Spiegel published on Wednesday, Apr. 22, but claimed he wasn't aware of what happened inside.

An application has been lodged against Romania on June 1, 2012, by Abd al Rahim Husseyn Muhammed Al Nashiri, at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), for alleged detentions, transfers, and interrogations of the applicant, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case is still outstanding.

But a recent decision from the ECHR, involving the same applicant but against Poland, and which became final on Feb. 16, 2015 after the refusal of an appeal, has already found that so-called "advanced interrogation techniques" suffered by a detainee in a CIA-run secret prison in Poland constituted torture. They were therefore in non-compliance with the European Convention.

As a member state of the Council of Europe (CoE), also having ratified the European Convention, Romania would be expected to follow the ECHR judgement as a legal precedent in any national court proceedings related to a similar secret prison site.

The CoE has been involved in identifying alleged CIA "black sites" since 2005, when the Parliamentary Assembly assigned rapporteur Dick Marty (Switzerland, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe political group) to conduct an inquiry into "alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states," following media reports of a network of secret prisons.

It was Mr. Marty's second report, which was adopted by the PACE general assembly in June 2007, which accused CoE member states Romania and Poland of having hosted US "high-value detainees." Endit