EU state admits it handed over terrorism suspects

AT least one European state has admitted to handing over terrorism suspects to foreign agents, the Council of Europe said yesterday, citing a breach of the country’s human rights duties.

Council Secretary General Terry Davis refused to say which of the 46 members had secretly transferred suspects and said it was up to national authorities or the European Court of Human Rights to take action.

Last November, Mr Davis gave member states a three-month deadline to hand over information relating to suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency had run a network of secret jails in Europe for al-Qaida suspects. He also asked them to reveal details they had about secret CIA flights across Europe in which prisoners are alleged to have been transferred to jails in third countries where they faced torture and abuses, a process known as rendition. “I am now in position to say that we no longer need to speak about ‘alleged’ cases of rendition,” Mr Davis told a news conference in the eastern French city of Strasbourg where the human rights watchdog is based.