CIA secret prison claims to be probed by EU commission

The European Commission said today it will investigate reports that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe to interrogate al-Qaida captives.

Separately, Europe’s top human rights organisation, the Strasbourg, France-based Council of Europe, said it too would try to see whether the claims were true.

The governments of the European Union’s 25 members nations will be informally questioned about the allegations, EU spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing said in response to a question by a reporter at an EU briefing.

“We have to find out what is exactly happening. We have all heard about this, then we have to see if it is confirmed,” he said.

US officials have refused to confirm or deny a report by the Washington Post that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating top al-Qaida suspects in several eastern European countries.

According to the report, a covert prison system was set up by the CIA nearly four years ago which at various times included sites in eight countries, including Afghanistan and several eastern Europe nations. It quoted current and former intelligence officials and diplomats as sources for its story.

Several European nations issued firm denials about the existence of such prisons.

“I repeat. We do not have CIA bases in Romania,” the country’s prime minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, said today.

EU member Hungary’s foreign ministry said it was never approached by the CIA and therefore there was no need for the government to carry out any separate inquiries. In the Baltics, the chief of Latvia’s Security Police, Janis Reinikis, said: “Such facilities do not and cannot exist here.” Denials also came from now-independent former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Armenia.

Roscam Abbing, the EU spokesman, said said such prisons could violate EU human rights laws and other European human rights conventions – and that the Commission would look into the issue.

However, he cautioned that the Commission, which handles the EU’s day-to-day affairs, could not take action against member states if they had indeed violated human rights codes.

“As far as the treatment of prisoners is concerned … it is clear that all 25 member states having signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the International Convention Against Torture, are due to respect and fully implement the obligations deriving from those treaties,” Roscam Abbing told reporters.

He said technical experts from the Commission’s justice and interior affairs directorate would be in contact with their counterparts across the EU and candidate countries – a category which currently includes Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey – to assess the truth of the report.

“When we have finished that examination … then we will further define our stance,” Roscam Abbing said.

A spokesman for Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis said the human rights watchdog would also be following the issue “very closely".

“Some investigations may have to be made,” added the spokesman, Matjaz Gruden. “It’s difficult to take action until we have a full report. However, if this was indeed happening on our territory, it would be a violation of Europe’s human rights treaty.”

He said secret detention breaches the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty legally binding on all 46 members of the Council of Europe, many of which are also EU members. In September, the Council sent a representative to the US to urge the American government to cease this practice.

Gruden said potential measures against European countries allowing the setting up of secret jails could only be determined after a full investigation into the issue.

Manfred Nowak, the UN special investigator on torture, said he had “not received any direct allegation or indirect information concerning any CIA place of detention in Eastern Europe – in other parts of the world, but not in Eastern Europe.”

Speaking from Austria, Nowak said he was “not investigating this now”, but added that UN investigators are still seeking “access to all places of detention of suspected terrorists held by the US authorities outside its territory".