Brussels, 18/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - Appearing before the American Congress in Washington, on Tuesday 17 April, a delegation of members of the European Parliament did not hesitate to speak out against the illegal activities of the CIA in Europe. MEPs belonging to the committee on civil liberties of the Parliament, who passed a report in February which strongly criticised the methods of the CIA in the fight against terrorism, told a committee of inquiry of the American Congress that the agency's information-gathering practices, consisting of secretly transferring arrestees from European countries into countries where they could be tortured, was illegal. Appearing before two sub-committees on foreign affairs of the Congress, the MEPs also reacted to criticisms made of them by CIA director Michael Hayden, who had accused the report of strongly exaggerating the extent of recourse to the method of secret flights and prisons for presumed terrorists, at a private session with the European parliamentarians. In the view of the MEPs, this practice is “an illegal instrument used by the United States in the fight against terrorism”, as the rapporteur of the committee of investigation of the EP on the activities of the CIA, Claudio Fava (PES, Italy), told members of the American Congress. “For us as European parliamentarians, the very notion of 'rendition' or 'extradition' done outside the control of any judicial authority within the territory of the European Union is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights”, said Jonathan Evans (EPP-ED, UK), president of the European delegation visiting Washington, as quoted by AP. For her part, the vice-president of the Parliament's committee of investigation, Sarah Ludford (ALDE, UK), spoke out strongly against this practice, which she felt was not only illegal but also counter-productive. “Many of us are hugely inspired by the constitutional values of the United States and very troubled indeed at the great damage done to the reputation and credibility of the United States by the human rights breaches of the last five years, and indeed of its effectiveness in counterterrorism”, she said. Democrat member William Delahunt said that this practice of rendition was seen as “hypocrisy” in that it prevents the United States from speaking credibly about respect for democracy and the rule of law in the world. In the opposite corner, a Republican member Dana Rohrabacher stated the view that rendition was a method which was perfectly acceptable and which was necessary to use in order to protect citizens from all countries against a new type of warfare. He also criticised the part of the EP report which refers to the trial in June of 26 people in Italy, including several American CIA agents, on the kidnapping of a radical imam in Milan in 2003 (EUROPE 9376). “When people who are defending us, who put their lives in jeopardy, but then to put them in jeopardy of being paraded through a foreign court and tossed in jail for doing what our government has asked them to do, and what our government asked them to do in cooperation with those very same European governments, this is a travesty, we should be supporting these people rather than trying to make their job more difficult”, he said, quoted by Voice of America.
The EP report accused the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy and other countries of having made their airports available to the CIA, in order to allow it to transport presumed terrorists to secret prisons in third countries, where they could be tortured (for more on the report on the CIA, see EUROPE 9366). (bc)