BERLIN — A German man who was mistaken for a terrorist and abducted nine years ago won a measure of redress Thursday when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his rights had been violated, and confirmed his account that he was seized by Macedonia, handed over to the CIA, brutalized and detained for months in Afghanistan.
In a unanimous ruling, the 17-judge panel, based in Strasbourg, France, found that Macedonia had violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, and ordered it to pay him about $78,000 in damages. It was the first time a court had ruled in favor of the man, Khaled el-Masri, 49, in a case that focused attention on the CIA’s clandestine rendition program, in which terrorism suspects were transported to third countries for interrogation.
The decision, which Amnesty International hailed as “a historic moment and a milestone in the fight against impunity,” is final and cannot be appealed. The CIA declined to comment. A lawsuit against the United States filed on el-Masri’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union was dismissed in 2006 on the grounds that it would expose state secrets. The group filed a petition in 2008 at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2008; the U.S. government has yet to respond.
El-Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, was pulled off a bus at the Macedonian border on New Year’s Eve in 2003 after guards confused him with an operative of al-Qaida with a similar name. He was taken to a hotel in the capital, Skopje, and locked in a room there for 23 days. His detention, along with the threat that he would be shot if he left the hotel room, “amounted on various counts to inhuman and degrading treatment,” the ruling said.
When he was handed over to the CIA rendition team at the Skopje airport, he was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded” in the presence of Macedonian officials, the ruling said, a treatment that “amounted to torture.” After more than four months, he was dropped on a roadside in Albania.
His German lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said his mental state had suffered from not only the abuse but also the “nine years of constantly fighting, being called a liar, a terrorist, an Islamist, a hard-liner.” El-Masri has broken off contact with his lawyers while serving a prison sentence on unrelated charges involving a 2009 assault on the mayor of Neu-Ulm in Bavaria.
Gnjidic said he had written Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany asking the German government to appeal to the U.S. government on el-Masri’s behalf and to see what could be done on the German side to help him.
“Macedonia was only the henchman of the great powers,” Gnjidic said. “The question is: What is with the big fish, with Germany, with the USA? All he ever wanted was to know why this was done to him and an apology.”
Jamil Dakwar, the head of the human-rights program at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that it had been “an uphill battle” to convince the Obama administration to hold officials accountable under international law for el-Masri’s mistreatment, but that the case before the commission “gives the Obama administration the opportunity to acknowledge the egregious violations against Khaled, offer an official apology and reparation.”
He called the European court’s ruling “historic” and said it “sends the message to European nations that they have a heightened obligation to investigate their complicity and cooperation with the illegal CIA extraordinary rendition program.”
Kostadin Bogdanov, a lawyer who represents Macedonia before the court, said Macedonia would pay the damages and perhaps take other actions in light of the ruling. They include reopening the el-Masri investigation and amending laws regarding criminal procedures or their implementation, he said. James Goldston, executive director at the Open Society Justice Initiative, who argued the case before the court, called the ruling “a comprehensive condemnation of the worst aspects of the post-9/11 war-on-terror tactics that were employed by the CIA and governments who cooperated with them.”
Macedonian authorities had argued that el-Masri was detained on suspicion of traveling with false documents, then traveled on his own to neighboring Kosovo — an argument the court called “utterly untenable.”
The court based its 92-page ruling not only on el-Masri’s version of events but also on testimony from former Macedonian officials, results of a German investigation, and U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.
American lawyer Marc Zaid, who has defended national-security whistle-blowers, said the ruling could “impact how we do business with the world.” He said victims are pinning hopes on European courts “because there is no remedy available in the U.S. system.”
In September, Italy’s highest criminal court upheld the convictions of 23 Americans in the abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street, paving the way to possible extradition requests for CIA operatives by Italian authorities.
In another rendition case Thursday, lawyers for a former Libyan dissident said he and his family had accepted a $3.5 million settlement from the British government, according to The Associated Press. The dissident, Sami al-Saadi, had sued the British government and its spy agency, MI6, saying that he had been abducted in Hong Kong in 2004 and sent to Libya, where he spent years in prison and was tortured. The rest of the family — his wife and four children — also were sent to Libya against their will.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicholas Kulish, Chris Cottrell and Scott Shane of The New York Times and by Angela Charlton, David Rising, Konstantin Testorides and Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/14/2012