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UK 'breaking law' over CIA secret flights
Condoleezza Rice flies into row over 'rendition' of terror suspects
By Ian Cobain and Luke Harding in Berlin
12/05/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- The British government is guilty of
breaking international law if it allowed secret CIA "rendition"
flights of terror suspects to land at UK airports, according to a
report by American legal scholars.
Merely giving permission for the flights to refuel while en route to
the Middle East to collect a prisoner would constitute a breach of
the law, according to the opinion commissioned by an all-party group
of MPs, which meets in parliament for the first time today.
The report comes as the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice,
arrives in Europe for a trip that has been overshadowed by the
growing dispute about the CIA's use of rendition - the term used to
describe the abduction of suspects who are taken to countries where
they can be questioned outside the protection of US law.
Several European governments, as well as the EU, have launched
investigations into hundreds of CIA flights which have shuttled
through the continent. Fresh revelations in Germany at the weekend
show that CIA aircraft have landed in the country on 437 occasions.
The Washington Post also reported that dozens of prisoners had been
wrongly taken under rendition, with some kidnapped in their home
countries and held incommunicado for weeks.
Ms Rice has promised to clarify the issue. Yesterday, however, US
officials made it clear she was likely to respond robustly to any
questioning from European leaders.
"We do not move people around the world so they can be tortured,"
Stephen Hadley, the White House's adviser, said yesterday, pledging
that the Bush administration would deal with the issue "in a
comprehensive way". In briefings officials said she would remind
European ministers that their governments had cooperated in
anti-terror operations with the US.
The all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, with
representatives from the three main parties, was formed after the
Guardian reported in September that aircraft operated by the CIA had
flown in and out of civilian airports and RAF bases in the UK at
least 210 times since September 11 2001.
Last night the Foreign Office said: "We have no evidence to
corroborate media allegations about use of UK territory in rendition
operations."
A report for the group by New York University's school of law's
centre for human rights and global justice, concluded: "A state
which aids or assists another state in the commission of an
internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally
responsible for doing so."
The authors believe the government could face legal sanctions
because of the UK's support. "Accomplice liability has been
recognised in international criminal law since at least the
Nuremberg trials," they said. Ms Rice, who meets Germany's
chancellor, Angela Merkel, tomorrow, also faces tough questions
about reports of secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe.
Yesterday Romania's foreign minister, Razvan Ungureanu, again denied
that his country had hosted a covert CIA jail - but left open the
possibility that the US had operated one without his government's
knowledge. He urged Human Rights Watch to hand over evidence it had
of secret CIA prisons in Romania.
Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP and chairman of the parliamentary group,
said: "By apparently assisting the US in the practice of
extraordinary rendition, the UK and the west are losing the moral
high ground so valuable to foreign policy since the end of the cold
war."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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