USA More Open on CIA Rendition Flights Than Its European Allies

US authorities proved considerably more open about the controversial rendition flights run by the CIA than their European counterparts, according to a report on flight records released under access-to-documents requests. Sweden, which had helped the CIA imprison and transfer two Egyptian citizens in 2001, stood out among the countries that supplied no information.

A wide gap between the USA and Europe

A report published by Access Info Europe and the legal-action charity Reprieve set out a broad pattern of responses among allies of the USA. In answer to Access Info Europe's requests, the USA's Federal Aviation Authority released 27,128 flight records on 29 November 2011, a substantial addition to the resources available to researchers and lawyers examining human-rights abuses committed during the "war on terror". Only five European nations — Denmark, Finland, Germany, Lithuania and Norway — provided comparable information. The mechanics of pursuing such requests are set out in the guidance on how to use European freedom of information.

Reprieve investigator Crofton Black said it was "a shocking indictment of European complacency" that while the USA released more than 27,000 records, Europe's air-traffic manager Eurocontrol would not release even one, and that it was equally unacceptable that Austria, France, Italy, Latvia, Romania and Spain simply ignored requests for data relating to serious human-rights abuses. Lydia Medland, researcher and campaigner at Access Info Europe, said the report showed there were no legitimate reasons why flight data could not be released.

Data that may not survive

The research also found that the data was not held indefinitely by air-traffic-control authorities: Denmark, Ireland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom told the researchers that records were destroyed after around five years, and in some countries the data was held by private bodies with no obligation to the public to retain it. Medland said it was imperative that the data be made public before it was destroyed, in order to permit full accountability for the violations.

Canada, Portugal and Sweden refused access outright and were marked red on the report's map, as was Eurocontrol, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, an intergovernmental organisation of 39 member states headquartered in Brussels. Eurocontrol had in the past played a central role in rendition investigations: its data was core to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly's 2006 inquiry led by Dick Marty, it provided flight logs to the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners, and in 2008 it disclosed more than 150 pages of flight data in response to a Danish government request.

What rendition involved

The rendition flights came to public attention in 2005. The term covered the widespread use of private, US-registered aircraft to transport individuals captured by the US and other governments in the context of the "war on terror". Prisoners moved in this way were routinely held in isolation and tortured, in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, the United Nations Convention against Torture, the Geneva Conventions and the domestic laws of all European countries.

A grave example dated to December 2001, when the Egyptians Mohammad Alzery and Ahmed Agiza were taken by force in Stockholm and flown to Egypt, where they were tortured in prison. The Swedish security police, SÄPO, were accused over the operation, while foreign minister Anna Lindh, who was politically responsible at the time, was later murdered in 2003; the case was subsequently revealed by Kalla fakta ("Cold facts"), an investigative programme on Swedish TV4 whose reporters received several awards for it. Despite Sweden's long tradition of open government, government sources told Swedish media that data on non-regular flights was covered by the Swedish Secrecy Act and not available, though the legal grounds for the refusal appeared unclear. The two organisations behind the report said all information accessed under the project would be collated and made available by The Rendition Project, a joint research project between the University of Kent and Kingston University funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. Practical tools for filing and tracking such requests are described under WhatDoTheyKnow.

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