Common Dreams / Published on Monday, December 5, 2005 by the Guardian / UK
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.
