RIGHTS-EUROPE:  Torture Flights Could Land Again
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BRUSSELS, Sep 27 (IPS) - Seven months after a major investigation spelt out  Europe's involvement in a murky U.S. torture and kidnapping  programme, the EU's governments have claimed they are  powerless to prevent such human rights abuses in the future.
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The flight of a convicted killer enjoying asylum in France has frustrated Italy&#39;s efforts to bring ex-guerrillas to justice and reopened wounds from an era when the Red Brigades terrorized the country.
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The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other detainees may have been held and interrogated at a U.S. air base in Germany after they were captured, a British human rights group said Friday.Comment
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An inquiry by British police officers said it found no evidence that Britain allowed the CIA to use the country's airports to take terror suspects to other countries.The 18-month inquiry examined claims by the human rights group Liberty that such 'extraordinary rendition' flights chartered by the U.S. government through the CIA landed in Britain before spiriting away terror suspects.Liberty, which had requested the inquiry, rejected its findings after they were released Friday.Michael Todd, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, agreed to investigate the allegations on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Read more
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STRASBOURG, France  - European governments and secret services accepted and concealed secret U.S. flights of terrorism suspects across Europe, the European Parliament said on Wednesday.
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The European parliament has approved a damning report that criticised member states for turning a &quot;blind eye&quot; to secret CIA flights used to transport terror suspects.
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The CIA operated secret prisons in Europe where terrorism suspects could be interrogated and were allegedly tortured, inquiry concludes.
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Critics ofÂ last week's agreementÂ allowing European passengers' personal data to be shared with U.S. authorities have just under a month to reshape the accord before it comes into force, said Stavros Lambrinidis, vice president of the European Parliament's civil liberties committee Monday.
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In these days of jittery travel, sometimes just a phone call can ground an airplane. Over the past week and a half, false bomb threats have forced at least half a dozen flights to make emergency landings in Europe, frightening passengers, tangling schedules and costing airlines big money.
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Human rights defenders face arrest and torture in China, and the European Union should raise the issue at a summit with Beijing's leaders this week, Amnesty International said in a new report Monday.
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Terror experts in Europe fear the bombings in Algeria offer a prime example of how jihad could spread to Europe
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The Transportation Security Administration is trying again to reconcile the privacy rights of non-dangerous airline passengers with the security need to identify potentially dangerous ones.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Parliament has delayed a vote on how to react to the U.S.' growing appetite for personal information about European citizens, in order to intensify its opposition. The delay follows a debate Wednesday evening in which the two other European Union lawmaking institutions both hardened their positions on the sensitive issue. The groups are drawing up a strategy for how toÂ renegotiate an agreement, over which they have been divided, with the U.S. over theÂ transfer of European air passenger data. The Parliament opposed the original agreement reached in 2004 to share the data -- 34 facts about every European entering or transiting through America by air, including credit card details and information about how and where a plane ticket was purchased. Even though the European Commission -- the E.U.'s executive branch -- and national governments in the 27 E.U. countries support strict European data protection laws, they negotiated an exemption from the rules in order to allow the U.S. to better protect itself from potential terrorist attacks. The European Parliament took the Commission and the Council of Ministers to the European Court of Justice over the passenger data agreement and forced a re-drafting of the law late last year. This agreement expires at the end of July and the E.U. will soon have to renegotiate the deal. While the Parliament is unlikely now to call for the complete scrapping of the agreement, it may well demand a shorter list of categories of data to be handed over. It may also demand that only U.S. immigration officials be granted access to the information. In a debate at the European Parliament Wednesday, Germanyâs deputy foreign minister, Guenther Gloser warned that negotiations with the U.S. will be âtortuous.â Germany holds the six-month rotating presidency of the 27-nation bloc. The European commissioner in charge of justice and home affairs issues, Franco Frattini told Parliamentarians that he has demanded an explanation from his counterparts in Washington D.C. about an apparent misuse of Europeansâ data that flouts both the original passenger rights' agreement as well as its replacement agreed last year. Frattini's concerns focus on the U.S. Automated Targeting System, which has been assessing millions of people since 2002. Some members of the U.S. Congress and privacy advocates believe the program is even illegal under the more lax U.S. data protection laws. "The right to privacy for me is nonnegotiable. It has to be respected," Frattini told the parliamentarians. Frattini's and Gloserâs speeches took many members of the Parliament by surprise, according to one Parliament official actively involved in civil liberties issues. "The MEPs were due to vote on an agreed position regarding the new round of negotiations with the U.S. today, but they have agreed to postpone the vote until the next plenary session in Strasbourg," she said, asking not to be named. The next plenary session is Feb. 12-15. "There is a mixture of joy and skepticism among the parliamentarians after hearing the strong language expressed in defense of Europeans rights to privacy," she said. "It would seem that the Commission and the Council of Ministers are both coming around to the Parliament's way of thinking on this urgent issue." The text is likely to take an even stronger line as a result of the delay, she said. The U.S. has threatened to fine airlines that fail to hand over the records, and to strip them of their landing rights in the U.S. Without any agreement, the airlines will be put in a difficult position: punished if they don't hand over the information, or sued for breaching European data protection laws if they do.
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The European Commission proposes co-ordinated anti-terror measures targeting flight data and the web.
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EU nationals held over planned airlift of 'orphans' after accusations from Chad.
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There is an increasingly fashionable assumption in Europe that terrorism cannot be defeated, only appeased through a process of negotiation that concedes core elements of the terrorists' agenda.
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STRASBOURG, France  - Rights groups have urged European Union lawmakers not to dilute on Wednesday a report that accuses their governments of colluding with the CIA on alleged secret flights of terrorism suspects in the bloc.