EU states must accept co-responsibility for torture crimes - Lynne

11.29.00pm GMT Thu 19th Feb 2009

MEPs have today adopted a new resolution calling for full accountability for European collusion in CIA torture flights and secret prisons. This comes two years after they adopted a report which laid out the evidence for up to a dozen European countries having been complicit.

The resolution welcomes President Obama's executive orders on closing Guantanamo and ending rendition - although it notes there are still ambiguities which might allow loopholes - and calls for a transatlantic return to tackling terrorism on the within the framework of human rights law. Reaffirming that under the UN torture convention any victim has a right to redress, it insists that the EU, Member States and US authorities must investigate and fully account for the violations of human rights and denials of fair trial perpetrated in the "War on Terror".

West Midlands LibDem MEP Liz Lynne, who is a member of the European Parliament's Human Rights Sub- Committee, speaking after the vote said:

"The adoption of this resolution will send a strong message that MEPs will not give up the search for truth and justice over the abuses committed after 2001. As the International Commission of Jurists, and former UK top spy boss Stella Rimington have recently stressed, if we stoop to the terror methods we are fighting, we lose both our moral power and our effectiveness."

"I hope MEPs such as British Labour ones will not take a line of shielding their own national governments from scrutiny. We already know enough about UK complicity in extraordinary rendition, in revelations about the use of Diego Garcia and MI5 facilitation of British citizens and residents like Binyam Mohammed being tortured, for any self-respecting parliamentarian to want to get the whole truth out. "

"Why should countries like Jordan - to which the law lords have ruled Abu Qatada should be returned - stick to unenforceable pledges not to torture when they know the UK is implicated in torture in Pakistan and outsourced rendition countries like Morocco?"

ENDS