The suspect filed various lawsuits against the CIA, the US, and Lithuania. The European Court unanimously ruled that violations of the ban on inhuman treatment occurred in Lithuania, and that nothing was done about it afterwards. For example, Vilnius should not have cooperated in transferring the suspect to an American prison because he risked a death sentence.
The government in Vilnius, in response, said it is willing to grant the man compensation of 100,000 euros.
At the time, the US conducted interrogations of captured suspects outside its territory by hired civilian interrogators so Washington could avoid prosecution. This allowed the government to also deny involvement in torture. Reportedly, there were similar secret prisons in Poland and Saudi Arabia.
The court said it obtained important information from a 2014 US Senate report, which stated that the CIA’s interrogation of Al Qaeda terrorism suspects in secret prisons was more brutal than previously disclosed and in some cases amounted to torture that did not yield effective intelligence.
Al-Hawsawi is currently held at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of being a facilitator and financial manager for Al Qaeda. This detention center on a US military base in Cuba symbolizes the excesses of the American ‘war on terror.’
The Guantanamo detention center in Cuba was established in 2002 by Republican President George W. Bush to house terrorism suspects. Approximately 3,000 Americans died in the 2001 hijacked airplane attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. The prison population peaked at about 800 detainees before starting to shrink.