Judicial caning in Malaysia has reached epidemic proportions and should be banned, according to an Amnesty International report.

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Malaysia urged to outlaw caning

The government must act to ensure the last UK resident held in Guantanamo Bay, Shaker Aamer, is tried or released, Amnesty International has said.

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Call to release Guantanamo UK man

This article titled “EU criticised for ‘complicity’ in CIA rendition programmes” was written by Richard Norton-Taylor, for The Guardian on Monday 15th November 2010 16.36 UTC

The European Union was sharply criticised by a leading human rights group today for failing to call to account member states, including Britain, for their complicity in the CIA’s rendition and secret detention programme.

The charge is made – ahead of an EU-US summit in Portugal on Saturday – by Amnesty International in a 53-page report, Open Secret, which, it says, contains mounting evidence of Europe’s complicity in rendition and secret detention.

All of the rendition victims interviewed by Amnesty say they were tortured or ill-treated in custody. The response has so far been extremely poor among EU countries, the report concludes. But it does say Europe remains “fertile ground” for accountability, especially compared to the US, which it describes as an “accountability-free zone”.

Amnesty’s European Institutions director, Nicholas Berger, said: “The EU has utterly failed to hold member states accountable for the abuses they’ve committed. The council of the EU hasn’t even acknowledged that the union itself bears collective responsibility for governments’ complicity in torture, unlawful detention and enforced disappearances.”

He added: “These abuses occurred on European soil. We simply can’t allow Europe to join the US in becoming an ‘accountability-free’ zone.”

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, welcomed the decision by David Cameron to set up an inquiry into allegations of British complicity in torture and other human rights abuses of individuals detained abroad. But she added: “It’s proving to be a long, hard road to get the UK and other European countries to face up to their full involvement in US-led abuses.”

Amnesty’s report outlines allegations of CIA renditions involving eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK. Two secret CIA prisons are now known to have existed in Lithuania, and there are separate allegations relating to Poland and Romania. There are claims that the UK territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was used as a secret prison and evidence it was used by the CIA as a transit stop in taking detainees to secret prisons.

Germany was complicit in the secret detention of Muhammad Zammar, interrogated by German agents while being held in secret detention in Syria in November 2002. German officials acknowledged that torture occurred in Syrian prisons. Zammar has yet to receive justice, despite a German parliamentary inquiry into his and others’ claims of abuse, Amnesty says.

Italy has convicted US and Italian agents for their involvement in the February 2003 abduction of Abu Omar in Milan, who was then unlawfully sent to Egypt, where he was held in secret and allegedly tortured. However, the cases against high-level US and Italian officials were dismissed on the basis of state secrecy and diplomatic immunity. The prosecutor has appealed against the dismissals while Italian claims of the need to protect “state secrets” continue to obstruct justice, says the Amnesty report.

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Hungary accused of failing Roma

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EU ‘must end Kosovo Roma return’

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Amnesty: Iraq holding 30,000 detainees

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Saudi Arabia urged not to paralyze man