The European Court of Human Rights has found Lithuania liable for human-rights violations against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Lithuania hosted a secret CIA prison on its territory, which led to an unfair military trial and the potential execution of a Saudi Arabian citizen after years of detention across the U.S. network of covert facilities.
This ECHR ruling – handed down more than two decades after the CIA secretly moved the Saudi terror suspect through a chain of black sites – has once again drawn attention to one link in that grim chain.
The ECHR’s judgment establishes that Lithuania breached the rights of Abd al-Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent who is now held at Guantanamo. According to his account, the CIA flew him into Lithuania in October 2005, where he was kept at a secret detention site for over five months before being moved on.
The judges found that al-Nashiri was brought over from Romania to Lithuania in October 2005 and held at a CIA facility known as the Violet Detention Facility until March 2006, after which he was transferred to Afghanistan. Despite Lithuania’s assertions that there is no direct evidence of his presence on its soil, the Court stressed that the covert nature of the CIA’s rendition program gets in the way of standard archival documentation. At the same time, flight data, CIA cables, earlier court rulings, and expert opinions were deemed sufficient to bear out his itinerary.
Furthermore, the ECHR held Lithuania accountable for keeping al-Nashiri in complete isolation, cutting him off from any contact with his family, as well as for later sending him on to Guantanamo despite the clear risk that evidence obtained through torture would be used against him.