The Lithuanian government has switched its position and has decided to appeal the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that Lithuania hosted a secret jail of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) where terrorism suspects were held and interrogated, the country's Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said on Wednesday.
VILNIUS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th August, 2018) The Lithuanian government has switched its position and has decided to appeal the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that Lithuania hosted a secret jail of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) where terrorism suspects were held and interrogated, the country's Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said on Wednesday.
On August 23, the press service of Lithuania's representative in the ECHR said that the country would not appeal the ECHR ruling, made on May 31 and stipulating that Lithuania was responsible for violating the rights of Abu Zubaydah, suspected of ties to Al Qaeda (a terrorist organization banned in Russia), as he was mistreated in the CIA jail that the country hosted between February 2005 and March 2006.
"We should act consistently and stick to the position, which we had formed earlier, to the end. We will address the Grand Chamber," Skvernelis told reporters.
According to him, the investigation that is currently underway in Lithuania has not revealed the facts that the ECHR established.
The ECHR ruled on May 31 that Lithuania violated a number of articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that it should pay 130,000 Euros ($152,000) to Zubaydah.
The court also concluded that there was a secret CIA jail in Romania, and the country was responsible for the violation of rights of Abd Rahim Nashiri, a terror suspect who had been held there from 2003 to 2005. Both Nashiri and Zubaydah are now being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
A parliamentary inquiry that Lithuania made in 2010 found that local security forces had helped the CIA establish a facility in the country's capital of Vilnius, although there was reportedly no proof that this was specifically a prison. In 2015, an investigation into the matter was relaunched in Lithuania.
