When plane spotting is more than just a hobby - CIA detention and torture in Europe and the tracking of rendition aircrafts
International human rights law is one of the greatest achievements of the human race. Yes, it is often infringed. But while we expect autocratic regimes to violate civil liberties, what if democracies were breaching them too? A new study from Taylor & Francis examines the tracking of the CIA’s rendition aircrafts and claims human rights have been violated in the very heart of Europe by a number of countries in connivance with the US secret services.
Published in The International Journal of Human Rights, the research reveals the tracking of rendition aircrafts carrying suspect terrorists has been integral to shed new light on to the CIA’s retention, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme. Examining findings from The Rendition Project, a collaboration between academics at Kent and Kingston universities and the NGO Reprieve, the study uncovers the involvement of a number of European states in providing vital logistical support to the US secret services, demonstrating the analysis of covert operations can further human rights research.
On July 2014, the European Convention of Human Rights (ECtHR) found Poland guilty of contravening international human rights by allowing the US secret services to hold and torture suspect terrorists on its soil. For the first time ‘a court had established … that European territory had been used in the War on Terror to house so-called “black sites”’, a network of secret prisons run by the CIA with support from local governments, explain the academics leading the study. These black sites were part of a wide system of detention facilities connected by hundreds of rendition flights used to transfer prisoners through sites, and either operated by commercial companies, or the CIA itself, in the early 2000s. Identifying these aircrafts was crucial to map the evolution of the RDI programme over the years and held perpetrators to account.
Thanks to a group of human rights investigators and journalists who started to record the movements of suspicious aircrafts using flight data, a first picture of the CIA’s secret detention programme in Europe started to emerge; this led to the identification of Romania and Lithuania, in addition to Poland, as crucial European nodes for the operation. But it was only after 2010, following the collaboration between The Rendition Project and the NGO Reprieve, that the inquiry really gained momentum and culminated with the publication of The Rendition Flight Database in 2013: the most comprehensive public account of the CIA’s covert activities, including over 60 identified rendition operations and over 11,000 flights by over 200 aircrafts. This data, triangulated with first-hand accounts, memoranda and declassified government documents, brought to the reconstruction of meaningful flight circuits, as well as to the identification of the pattern and practice of rendition flights in the War on Terror.
Whereas further research into this matter is still needed, this study is key in showing that tracking rendition aircrafts can truly help to identify human rights violations and secure legal remedy. Moreover, in underlining the value of collaborations between scholars and human rights investigators in uncovering abuse, it puts them at the very heart of the fight to protect worldwide democracy and freedom.
Tracking rendition aircraft as a way to understand CIA secret detention and torture in Europe
Sam Raphael, Crofton Black, Ruth Blakeley & Steve Kostas
The International Journal of Human Rights
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* Read the full article online:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2015.1044772
About Taylor & Francis Group
Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, e-books and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine. From our network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues.
For more information please contact:
Joseph Couchman
Marketing Executive, Journals Marketing
email: joseph.couchman@tandf.co.uk
For more information please contact: Joseph Couchman Marketing Executive, Journals Marketing email: joseph.couchman@tandf.co.uk
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About Taylor & Francis Group
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Taylor & Francis Group partners with researchers, scholarly societies, universities and libraries worldwide to bring knowledge to life. As one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, ebooks and reference works our content spans all areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, and Technology and Medicine.
From our network of offices in Oxford, New York, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Stockholm, New Delhi and Johannesburg, Taylor & Francis staff provide local expertise and support to our editors, societies and authors and tailored, efficient customer service to our library colleagues.
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