The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has taken up a third case against Lithuania over the alleged operation of the US Central Intelligence Agency prison in the country and the human rights violations committed there.
The Lithuanian government has received a petition from Abd Al Rahim Hussein Al Nashiri, a Saudi national, complaining of torture, deprivation of liberty, and restrictions on his privacy and family life, when he was transferred to a secret CIA facility in Lithuania.
He also claims that he was later transferred from Lithuania to a jurisdiction where there was a serious risk that he would not receive a fair trial.
Lithuania has failed to carry out an effective investigation into his complaints about the treatment he received in the CIA’s secret programme, the Saudi national said.
According to the case, Al Nashiri was arrested in Dubai in October 2002 and has since been detained in various secret CIA facilities. He was considered by the US to be a key Al Qaeda operative in the bombing of embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack in Yemen on the US Navy destroyer USS Cole in 2000, and the attack on a French tanker in the Gulf of Aden in 2002.
In his petition, he claims that he was transferred to Lithuania in October 2005 and was held here until March 25, 2006, when the secret CIA prison in Lithuania was closed.
The Saudi national is currently being held at the US-run Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
A military commission in Guantanamo is hearing a case in which the applicant faces the death penalty on charges of involvement in the above-mentioned attacks on a US warship and a French civilian tanker.
The ECHR has previously found violations of the Human Rights Convention in relation to similar complaints by Al Nashiri in cases against Poland and Romania.
Lithuania has already lost two cases before the Strasbourg Court for allegedly operating a CIA prison in the country.
In 2018, the ECHR found that a secret CIA prison was operating in Lithuania in 2005–2006 and that another Saudi national, Abu Zubaydah, was imprisoned there. In January this year, it also awarded 100,000 euros to Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a Saudi national, for unlawful detention.
Further reading
In late 2009, ABC News broke a story that the CIA operated a black site in Lithuania where it transported several suspects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A 2014 US Senate report also mentioned “Site Violet” which operated in 2005–2006. Although the redacted report does not situate the prison in Lithuania, human rights organisations believe that “Site Violet” operated in Antaviliai near Vilnius in a State Security Department’s (VSD) training centre.
The Lithuanian government has denied that the Antaviliai facility was used by the CIA to detain people. It argued at the ECHR that the facility was used for intelligence activities, while suspicious flights from the US carried communications equipment, not people.
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