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The CIA torture techniques detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report – repeated mock drownings causing convulsions and vomiting, inserting pureed food into the rectum of a suicidal prisoner – are truly the stuff of nightmares. They have rightly led to calls – including from the United Nations – for criminal accountability for those who ordered and carried it out.

Europe must also answer for its role. As Human Rights Watch was among the first to reveal almost ten years ago, European governments cooperated with the CIA’s abduction and illegal transfer of terrorism suspects to secret detention centers where they were tortured, a practice referred euphemistically to as “extraordinary rendition.” While incriminating elements of Europe’s role have been redacted from the public version of the Senate report, we already know many of the details. We know that Poland, Romania, and Lithuania hosted secret CIA prisons. We know that Sweden, Macedonia, Italy, and the United Kingdom were complicit in US rendition of terrorism suspects to torture.

This has been confirmed by investigations by the United Nations, the European Parliament, and Council of Europe. Those investigations showed that other European countries – including Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Spain – were also involved to various degrees.

There has been some progress in Europe towards shining light on these abuses, notably at the European Court of Human Rights which has ruled against Poland and Macedonia over the role of those governments in secret detention and rendition. Sweden has compensated the two men it helped abduct and send to torture in Egypt in 2001. Lithuania shelved its parliamentary investigation. A judicial inquiry into UK complicity in torture and rendition was shelved, and the government has reneged on its promise to hold a second one, giving the task instead to a compromised parliamentary committee.

Criminal accountability has been limited to Italy, which convicted three CIA agents, including the former Italy CIA chief Jeff Castelli, for the 2003 kidnapping and rendition to torture of an Egyptian cleric. Criminal investigations into UK involvement in two renditions to Libya are ongoing. The investigation in Poland is stuck. Romania remains in full denial about its role.

Unless Europe is willing to expose its own role in this sordid chapter, and hold those responsible to account, history risks repeating itself. 

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