The United
Nations has said that officials who committed rights violations against terror
suspects must be prosecuted. Several countries expressed outrage at a US Senate
report on the CIA's counterterrorism program.
The UN's
special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, said on
Wednesday that senior US officials who authorized and tortured prisoners in
consonance with former President George W. Bush's security policy after the
September 11, 2001 attacks should be made accountable for committing human
rights violations.
"The
individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy ... must be brought to
justice and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their
crimes," he said, according to the Associated Press.
International
law prohibits granting immunity to government officials who allow the use of
torture, Emmerson said, referring to the Senate Intelligence Committee report
on the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques of terror suspects at secret overseas
facilities.
The document, released on Tuesday claimed that the CIA's detention and
interrogation program of al Qaeda suspects following the 9/11 attacks included
harsh techniques such as waterboarding and "Russian roulette" to
force detainees into admission.
'Gross
violation of human rights'
The report
sparked controversy all over the world, prompting US President Barack Obama to
say that the CIA's rights violations "did significant damage to America's
standing in the world."
Germany's
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier condemned the CIA's activities as
documented in the report, saying they amounted to a "gross violation of
our liberal, democratic values" and that "what was then considered
right and done in the fight against Islamic terrorism was unacceptable and a
serious mistake."
In a
statement on Wednesday, EU spokeswoman Catherine Ray also acknowledged that the
report raised "serious questions about the violation of human rights by
the US authorities," but that it was "a positive step in confronting
publicly and critically the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and
interrogation program."
Poland
admits to hosting torture center
Although
the EU's official statement did not comment on the CIA's overseas detention
facilities, especially in EU countries, Poland's former President Aleksander
Kwasniewski revealed on Wednesday that his country secretly hosted a CIA prison
where al Qaeda suspects were tortured. Kwasniewski said that, as a member of
NATO, Poland had enhanced intelligence cooperation with the United States after
the 2001 September attacks, in which more than 2,000 people died.
Poland's
former president said his country had allowed terror suspects on its soil under
the condition that they be treated as prisoners of war.
Warsaw also
put pressure on the US president in 2003 to end the brutal interrogations on
its soil, but in July this year, Poland was slammed by the European Court of
Justice (ECJ) for allowing the torture of a Palestinian and a Saudi terror
suspect within its territory before the two were sent to Guantanamo Bay. The
ECJ concluded that Poland had cooperated in the CIA's program.
Polish
prosecutors have been investigating the secret prison since 2008 and media
reports suggest that the CIA had secret prisons in Afghanistan, Lithuania,
Poland, Romania and Thailand. The Senate report also mentions that US officials
detained 119 suspects in so-called CIA "black sites," but the names
of the countries participating have not been mentioned.
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