The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights would like to reiterate the appeal for immediate and complete explanation by Polish authorities of the issue of alleged existence of CIA prisons in Poland. Since the violation of human rights might have occurred in reference to the existence of the secret detention, Poland is obliged to clarify this matter.
In our opinion, Polish authorities have not taken effective steps to explain the issue of the involvement of Polish authorities into the program of illegal detention of terrorism suspects. Firstly, no parliamentary committee has been appointed until now. Furthermore, the investigation conducted since 2008 by the Appeal Prosecutor Office in Warsaw might be described as prolonged and inefficient. So far, it has not provided any explanation of this subject matter. The society neither knows the facts of the proceedings, nor an approximate date of its conclusion.
Steps undertaken by Lithuanian authorities, which aimed to explain media reports from August 2009 about the existence of CIA prisons, illustrate properly conducted parliamentary investigation. On 5th November 2009 the Lithuanian parliament passed a resolution in which stated the need to clarify whether there were secret CIA prisons in Lithuania. On 22nd December 2009 the parliamentary commission of national security and defence published a report concerning results of the parliamentary investigation, which was subsequently adapted by parliament on 19th January 2010. The Commission found that at least two secret detention centres were created and that during 2002-2005 CIA chartered airplanes were repeatedly allowed to land in Lithuania. According to the report, leaders of the Department of State Security were aware of the cooperation with CIA, however they did not inform about it the highest authorities of the country. Therefore the parliamentary committee decided to bring the case to the prosecutor to determine whether leaders of the Department of State Security abused their powers. In reference to the disclosed information, President of Lithuania Grybauskaite dismissed the Lithuanian ambassador in Georgia – Meeys Laurinkus, who was the head of the Department of State Security in time when, according to the report, secret cooperation with the CIA in Lithuania took place.
It should be noted that the verification of the information about the existence of secret CIA prisons by Lithuanian politicians took place after the media reports. In Poland, however, there was no appointment of a parliamentary committee, despite the fact that the press and television reports have been confirmed by the European Council and European Parliament. Both institutions appealed to Poland to resolve this matter. In Lithuania the information about the existence of prisons was verified within a few weeks, while in Poland, although information about the alleged existence of secret detention centres appeared in 2005 (article of Dana Priest in The Washington Post), there has not been taken any effective steps to verify this information.
The existence of the secret CIA detention centres in Poland would lead to a conclusion that basic human rights might have been violated in Poland, inter alia, by the use of torture. In addition, this circumstance was made very probable by the report published on 26 January 2010 prepared by Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture and Martin Scheinin, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while combating terrorism. For this reason, in the opinion of Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, explaining these issues should belong to the priorities of the Polish authorities. Its verification would show that Poland deserves to be called democratic state of law.
On behalf of the Board of The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights,
Dr Adam Bodnar, Secretary of the Board
Danuta Przywara, President of the Board
