Lithuania sentenced to secret CIA prison

According to the European court, Lithuania enabled the American intelligence service CIA to torture al-Qaeda suspects in a secret prison. Lithuania has thus violated European human rights by allowing the CIA to subject a suspect to “inhuman treatment”.

The suspect has initiated several proceedings against the CIA, the US and Lithuania. The European court unanimously ruled that Lithuania had violated the ban on inhuman treatment, and subsequently did nothing about it. For example, Viilnius should not have cooperated in the transfer of the suspect to an American prison because he ran the risk of being sentenced to death.

The government in Vilnius said in a response that it was prepared to award the man compensation of 100,000 euros. 

At the time, the US had the interrogations of captured suspects carried out on territory outside the United States by hired civilian interrogators so that Washington could not be prosecuted for it. This also allowed the government to deny that it was guilty of torture. Reportedly, there were also such secret prisons in Poland and Saudi Arabia. 

The court said it obtained important information from a 2014 U.S. Senate report that found the CIA's interrogation of Al Qaeda terrorism suspects in secret prisons was more brutal and in some cases amounted to torture that failed to provide effective intelligence .

Al-Hawsawi is now being held in Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of being a facilitator and financial manager of Al Qaeda. This detention center on a US military base in Cuba symbolizes the excesses of the US 'war on terror'.

The Guantanamo detention center in Cuba was established in 2002 by Republican President George W. Bush to house terrorism suspects. The 2001 hijacked plane attacks on New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon killed about 3,000 Americans. The prison population grew to a peak of about 800 inmates before it began to shrink.