Tag Archives: Torture
10 April 2012
On 21 March 2012, the District Court of the Hague awarded €1 million ($1.33 million) in compensation to a Palestinian doctor tortured and jailed in Libya along with five Bulgarian nurses for purportedly infecting children with the AIDS virus, the doctor’s lawyer said Tuesday. The award is directed against 12 former Libyan government officials who were responsible for the torture.
Initially the claim was also directed at Gadaffi, but the Dutch government took the position that he had immunity and the complaint thus could not be served to him, after which his name was removed from the claim. As to the others, no issue of immunity was raised by either the government or the court, and the defendants did not appear. A parallel claim against Libya, that until now has refused to pay compensation, is pending before the Human Rights Committee (raising interesting questions of shared responsibility between states and individuals).
Source: Khaleej Times | Palestinian medic gets Libyan jail compensation
Source: The Guardian | Dutch court compensates Palestinian for Libya jail
9 December 2011
On 11 November 2011 a German administrative court in Cologne decided that Germany violated the prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment (Articles 3 ECHR and 7 ICCPR) by transferring Somali pirates captured by the German fregate “Rheinland-Pfalz” in the framework of the EU anti-piracy mission ATALANTA to Kenya. The German court rejected two other claims by plaintiffs that the capture and detention on the “Rheinland-Pfalz” were in violation of international and German constitutional law.
Decision (in German): link
8 September 2011
A pending U.N. report alleges that prisoners at some Afghan detention facilities have been beaten and, in some cases, given electric shocks. As a result, NATO has suspended detainee transfers to a number of questionable facilities until it can verify if the allegations are true.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk
5 September 2011
Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
21 July 2011
The UK High Court today permitted Kenyan nationals to sue the government of the United Kingdom for acts of torture that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s in the former UK colony of Kenya. It therewith rejected the Government’s position that it could not be liable because the torture happened outside of the UK and that Kenya had its own legal colonial government, which was responsible for the camps. Although not yet decided on merits, the case already seems relevant to the question of sharing responsibility between local governments and States that act as colonial or mandated powers.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk