21/12/2005 (Agence Europe) - “Rendition policy is neither new nor unknown to European leaders”, the former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said on 18 December during an interview with the BBC. Powell was therefore surprised that Europeans were “shocked” as, he said, the CIA has been transferring suspects to countries where international law is not rigorously upheld for years, for interrogation purposes. The outgoing Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, firmly denied, on 18 December, that there were any CIA secret detention centres in Poland but implicitly recognised that CIA planes had stopped in his country on transit. The NGO, Human Rights Watch, asserts, however, that Poland was the CIA's main base in Europe for the interrogation of terrorist suspects held prisoner. Powell's declaration comes two weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said that the United States “fully respects the sovereignty” of its allies (EUROPE 9085). On the other hand, she had not denied the existence of CIA flights for the transfer of prisoners (EUROPE 9086).