European Court of Human Rights hears case on Romania's secret CIA prison

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held an audience here Wednesday on a case concerning a Saudi Arabian national suspected of terrorism, and which calls into question Romania's responsibility in a secret prison program targeting presumed terrorists in Europe.

Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad Al Nashiri was affirmed to have been imprisoned between April 2004 and September 2006 in a secret detention center in Romania run by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

He was held there "with the knowledge of Romanian authorities," before his transfer to U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. In the application that Al Nashiri submitted to the ECHR in 2012, he also claims to have been maltreated and tortured on Romanian soil during this period.

The Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent, considered as having been close to Osama Ben Laden, is accused by Washington to have been the head of a terrorist attack aimed at the USS Cole, a U.S. marine vessel, which caused 17 deaths on Oct. 12, 2000 in the Yemeni harbor of Aden. He faces the death penalty in the United States. He is also suspected to have played a role in the attack against a French oil tanker in October 2002.

In his application, Al Nashiri said Bucharest violated the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly articles 3 and 5, which forbid the use of torture and protect the right to liberty and security.

He put forward the "absence of an effective investigation by Romania" on the circumstances surrounding the alleged mistreatment, his detention, and his transfer to Guantanamo.

He claims that "in enabling his transfer despite substantial grounds for believing that there was a real risk that he would be threatened with the death penalty" Bucharest broke its obligation relative to the European human rights convention protocols on the abolition of capital punishment.

During the audience, Bucharest's representative declared "the Romanian government does not have the intention to contest the existence of a secret prison program," but judged that "beyond these objective elements, there is not objective evidence of complicity by Romanian authorities."

In another case previously introduced by Al Nashiri, the ECHR made a judgement in 2014 against Poland for its "complicity" in the implementation of a secret CIA prison system targeting presumed terrorists. In this case, the ECHR ordered Poland to pay Al Nashiri 100,000 euros (110,000 U.S. dollars) for moral damage.

The date of the ECHR verdict in the case of Al Nashiri versus Romania has not yet been announced.

The existence of clandestine prisons controlled by the CIA outside U.S. territory, revealed at the end of 2005 by the American daily newspaper The Washington Post, was acknowledged by then U.S. President George W. Bush in 2006.

In 2014, the U.S. Senate published a disturbing report on what happened in these secret prisons that had been established after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as part of the American "War on terror."

Members of European Parliament (MEPs) condemned the secret detention and restitution program run by the CIA and have regularly called for deeper investigations into the involvement of European Union (EU) member states.

Last June, the European Parliament adopted a resolution for EU member states to "investigate, ensuring full transparency, the allegations that there were secret prisons on their territory," and called for those responsible to be brought to justice. Endit