Amnesty: Irish Government misleads UN on secret detentions

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Thursday January 28, 2010 15:54 by Amnesty International - Ireland - Amnesty International

Amnesty International Ireland has accused the Irish Government of giving misleading answers to United Nations researchers who yesterday published a detailed report on the use of secret detentions in the name of counter-terrorism.

Amnesty International Ireland has accused the Irish Government of giving misleading answers to United Nations researchers who yesterday published a detailed report on the use of secret detentions in the name of counter-terrorism.

“Secret detentions, as the UN report clearly states, constitute a series of human rights violations and ‘cannot be justified under any circumstances’,” said Amnesty International Ireland Executive Director Colm O’Gorman. “The practice is absolutely against international human rights law and international humanitarian law.”

“The Irish Government is reported as telling the UN that it had ‘No involvement or collaboration in secret detention on the territory of another State’. It cannot say this with any confidence.

“The Irish Government has refused to search suspect rendition flights coming through Shannon. It cannot know whether prisoners have been transferred into secret detention through Ireland because it has chosen not to know. Instead it depended on dubious and discredited assurances from the US Government that no prisoners were being transported through Shannon. These same assurances were given to the British Government and shown to be false.

“But it is not just about transferring prisoners through Irish airspace, it is about making rendition possible by allowing Shannon to be used as a launching pad for CIA operations.

“In 2004 Khaled al-Maqtari disappeared into the CIA’s network of secret prisons for almost three years of solitary confinement and torture. The plane that took him from Baghdad to Kabul, where his ordeal began, came through Shannon on 20 January 2004.

“There are at least three other cases of the CIA using Shannon Airport as a key part of the renditions networks.”

The UN study highlights the global nature of the problem, naming dozens of countries, covering every region of the world, as undertaking secret detention, or being complicit in it through international networks of detainee transfers and intelligence agencies.

Amnesty International Ireland again urged the Irish Government to investigate the human rights implications of its own role in facilitating renditions operations.

“It is three years since Ireland was identifiedn as passively colluding with secret detention and renditions by the Senator Dick Marty in a report for the Council of Europe,” said Colm O’Gorman

“It is more than a year since the Government promised to review the law governing the searching of suspected rendition flights at Shannon but there has been no real progress. The Taoiseach must announce when the Cabinet review will finally take place. He must ensure that it is comprehensive and commit to making the findings public.”

Background
The Joint Study was prepared by four Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (the Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism; the Special Rapporteur on torture; the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances).

The Special Procedures will present the Study for discussion by states and civil society at the UN Human Rights Council at its next session; the presentation and discussion is scheduled for the week beginning 8 March.
Amnesty International submitted information to the experts and the organisation’s published research features among the wide range of sources cited in the study report.