The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee sharply criticised on Friday the use of secret detention and so-called "rendition" in the fight against terrorism.
"Secret detention amounts in itself to ill-treatment and - due to the removal of fundamental safeguards which it entails - inevitably heightens the risk of resort to other forms of ill-treatment," the Strasbourg-based CPT said in its latest annual report published on Friday. In view of reports that certain secret detention facilities were located in Europe, the CPT urged anyone with information concerning such facilities to bring it to its attention.
The report said the CPT was "particularly concerned" by the practice of "rendition" - extra-judicial transfers from one country to another - for detention and interrogation outside the normal criminal justice system.
A June report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate "war on terror" suspects under a programme authorised by the countries' presidents.
"It is disturbing, at the beginning of the 21st century, to be obliged to recall basic principles long enshrined in both national and international law and which one had assumed would be inviolate," Friday's report said. Set up by the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in force in 47 countries in Europe, the CPT examines the treatment of people deprived of their liberty.
It inspects prisons and juvenile detention centres, police stations, holding centres for immigration detainees and psychiatric hospitals. CPT president Mauro Palma said that he could not be sure that secret detentions were still being carried out in European countries.
"In many cases, there were elements indicating that some of these places were used as prisons, even in recent times, but when we visited these places, they were no longer used in that purpose," he told AFP by phone.