NAIROBI, Kenya — A case filed before an African judicial body could open a new front in efforts by human-rights groups to hold the CIA and its partners accountable for what they claim was the torture of innocent victims in secret “black sites” prisons around the world.
The case involves Mohammed al-Asad, who said he was arrested in late 2003 at his home in Tanzania, blindfolded and flown to a secret prison in Djibouti. He said he was subjected to two weeks of torture and inhuman treatment in a clandestine CIA rendition and detentions program designed to nab suspected terrorists.
From Djibouti, human-rights activists say, Asad was dispatched into a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, before being jailed in his native Yemen. In 2006, Asad was released, without being charged with a terrorism-related crime.
On Monday, American and British human-rights lawyers filed legal documents at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, urging it to require the government of Djibouti to “answer for abuses it committed as part of the CIA’s secret” program. The case made public Monday was filed confidentially in December 2009.
Djibouti’s embassy in Nairobi did not respond to requests for a response, and a government spokesman in Djibouti was not reachable for comment. The CIA declined to discuss Asad’s case and denied the allegations of abuse.
If the commission accepts the case, it will represent the first international case to inquire into the role of an African country in the U.S. rendition program, human-rights lawyers said.
The efforts to bring Asad’s case to Africa follow attempts by human-rights activists to bring legal actions in U.S. courts involving other alleged victims of the CIA rendition program. Their cases were dismissed on the basis of the “state secrets doctrine,” which bars lawsuits deemed to threaten U.S. intelligence secrets. Margaret Satterthwaite, one of Asad’s attorneys, said they had not tried to sue the U.S. government, “though this remains an option.”
