Terror Torture -- Kenya guilty of abuse by proxy

By: Ababu Namwamba
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[ Posted On: 2007-10-31 ]

In the prevailing effervescent campaign atmosphere, some critical issues could easily get drowned in the political cacophony.

One such issue caught my eye this past week as President Kibaki and his top challenger, Lang'ata MP Raila Odinga, angled for the Muslim vote.

When he joined Muslim faithful in Mombasa for Idd, Kibaki made the lugubrious claim that he knew nothing about Kenyans carted out of our jurisdiction over terrorism allegations. He 'ordered' the information to be availed to him, and even formed a task force.

The ODM supremo not only furnished the Commander-in-Chief with the 'missing' data through a public letter; but went on to ask Mr President some weighty questions that laid him and his administration bare to some damaging embarrassment.

The President has been left with egg on his face, for attempting to hoodwink Muslims and the nation to curry electoral favour.

He fell short of his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and defend every citizen; and for appearing not in control of organs and instruments of State. But I digress!

My mission today is to cast some light on this 'thing' that, in legal circles, we call rendition, and which others have variously christened 'torture by proxy' or 'outsourcing torture' or 'torture flights'.

In law, rendition is a 'surrender' or 'handing over' of a person or property particularly from one jurisdiction to another. For criminal suspects, extradition is the more common type of rendition.

In the US distinction is drawn between inter-State rendition and international rendition. Rendition between States is required by Article Four, Section Two of the US Constitution, or the rendition clause, which places a presumptive duty on each State to render suspects on the request of another State.

The Supreme Court has established certain exceptions, such as that set in Kentucky v Dennison that inter-state rendition and extradition were not a federal writ.

Rendition was infamously used to recapture fugitive slaves, who under the Constitution and various federal laws had virtually no human rights.

Since the 1980s, the United States has increasingly turned to rendition as a judicial and extra-judicial method for dealing with foreign defendants, with the first well-known case involving the Achille Lauro hijackers.

Violation of human rights

The practice of international rendition has grown sharply since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and now includes a form where suspects are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party State for interrogation and imprisonment, often without ever being on American soil.

Human rights groups charge that extraordinary rendition is a violation of the UN Convention on Torture, because suspects are taken to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, thus circumventing due process.

Writing in The Washington Post in March 2005, David Ignatius described rendition as the CIA's "antiseptic term" for its practice of sending captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation.

"Because some of those countries torture prisoners — and because some of the suspected terrorists 'rendered' by the CIA say they were in fact tortured — the debate has tended to lump rendition and torture together. The implication is that the CIA is sending people to Egypt, Jordan or other Middle Eastern countries because they can be tortured there and coerced into providing information they would not give up otherwise," noted Ignatius.

A November 2005 report to the UN General Assembly by Manfred Nowak, a UN special rapporteur on torture, catalogued that the US, Britain, Canada, France, Sweden and Kyrgyzstan were violating international human rights conventions by deporting terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Uzbekistan.

"Several governments, in the fight against terrorism, have transferred… to countries where they may be at risk of torture or ill-treatment," says the report, 'Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment'.

The study cites Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which says that; "No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture".

Kenya, under Kibaki, has not only joined the notorious league of Rendition States, but has indeed bested the big boys by rendering our very own citizens.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Ababu Namwamba is an advocate of the Kenyan High Court.

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