Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania (Eur. Ct. H.R.)
ENFollowing the events of September 11, 2001, the CIA established “the High-Value Detainee Program,” also known as the Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. On December 14, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a heavily redacted 500-page Executive Summary of the Committee's “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.” The full Committee Study is more than 6,700 pages long and remains classified. The release of the Executive Summary, however, disclosed new facts and provided a significant amount of new information to the European Court of Human Rights—mostly based on CIA classified documents—about the CIA extraordinary rendition and secret detention operations; their foreign partners or cooperators; as well as the plight of certain detainees, including Abu-Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania is the European Court's first judgment to have taken advantage of the information provided in the Senate Committee's Executive Summary of its Study. [...] The case of Abu Zubaydah and the companion case of Al Nashiri, involving Romania and issued the same day, both involved individuals who had been captured in 2002 and were held at “black sites” until their transfer to Guantánamo Bay in 2006. The European Court declared that Lithuania and Romania violated Articles 3 (torture), 5 (liberty), 8 (private life), and 13 (right to an effective legal remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights for hosting secret prisons where the CIA held and interrogated terrorism suspects during the period from 2002 to 2006. Lithuania and Romania both argued that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the detainees had been held in secret detention centers on their territory or that the governments knew about their ill-treatment.
