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EU govts attacked for handling of CIA jail reports |
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Friday, 2 December 2005By Mark John
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union parliamentarians accused leaders of the 25-country bloc on Thursday of failing to press the United States hard enough on media reports of secret CIA jails holding terrorism suspects in Europe.
Members of the European Parliament said EU presidency holder Britain and the EU Commission had shirked a full investigation into allegations the CIA was running secret jails in Eastern Europe and covertly flying prisoners through EU airports.
"I am not reassured that there is sufficient determination by the Council (of EU states) to get to the bottom of these allegations," Liberal Democrat Sarah Ludford told a meeting of the Parliament's civil liberties committee.
Referring to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's move to write to Washington seeking clarification of the reports, she added: "That sounds to me rather less than zealous".
Austrian Green deputy Johannes Voggenhuber accused EU member states and the Commission, the EU's powerful executive, of having no interest in checking allegations which, if true, would be deeply embarrassing to the governments involved.
"I feel we are being held back by the Commission," he told the hearing, suggesting that the Commission was not making full use of its access to European air traffic data which could help clarify reports on the alleged CIA flights.
The European Parliament Socialist Group, the second largest group in the assembly, called on Wednesday for the U.S. envoy to the EU to answer questions before the parliament.
European parliamentarians are studying whether to launch their own inquiry into the reports alongside one being conducted by the Council of Europe, Europe's top human rights watchdog.
In Rome, the prime ministers of Italy and Spain said on Thursday there were no secret CIA prisons in their countries.
"As far as the government knows, there are so far no elements that can lead us to believe that there have been any illegal acts," said Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, answering a question about whether there were any CIA jails in Spain.
He was speaking at a joint news conference with Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, who said: "We have no news on that and we can exclude that anything like that could have happened on our territory."
Washington has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of secret jails as reported by the Washington Post last month. U.S.-based campaign group Human Rights Watch said Poland and Romania were the most likely locations, which both have denied.
Diplomatic sources in Europe said Britain's letter to Washington noted that the reports had "attracted considerable parliamentary and public attention" across Europe.
"The EU would therefore be grateful for clarification the U.S. can give about these reports in the hope that this will allay parliamentary and public concerns," it continued.
EU justice and interior ministers did not raise the matter during talks in Brussels on Thursday, officials said.
The EU Commission has said it will make informal checks on the allegations and EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has said any EU state that secretly hosted a CIA prison could lose its voting rights in the bloc.
However such a sanction is unprecedented and would be hard to implement, requiring the backing of all the other member states and of the European Parliament for it to take effect.
(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers in London, Marie-Louise Moller in Brussels and Philip Pullella in Rome)
Reuters via swissinfo |
Friday, 2 December 2005
swissinfo.org
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