NEWS
Four European Court rulings condemn Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Macedonia for hosting secret CIA prisons — no one in the United States has ever answered for that torture
July 15, 2026 — Europe/United States
The facts: four cases, one program
Between 2012 and 2018, the Grand Chamber and sections of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued four rulings establishing, in procedural detail, the complicity of four European states in the CIA's secret detention and torture program in the decade following September 11.
The most striking case — mistaken identity: Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen mistaken for an al-Qaeda member due to a name mix-up, was arrested at the Macedonian border on December 31, 2003, held incommunicado for 23 days in a Skopje hotel, then handed over to a CIA rendition team at the airport — where he was violently assaulted, hooded, and flown to Afghanistan to a prison known as the "Salt Pit." He remained detained there for roughly four months, until the CIA itself realized the case of mistaken identity. On December 13, 2012, the Court unanimously found the facts proven "beyond reasonable doubt," classifying the episode as enforced disappearance and torture, with direct responsibility falling on Macedonia.
The sites in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (suspected in the USS Cole bombing) and Abu Zubaydah (believed to be a senior al-Qaeda member) were held at a secret CIA facility in Poland between 2002 and 2003. On July 24, 2014, the Court found that Poland had violated Articles 3 (prohibition of torture), 5 (liberty), 6 (fair trial), 8 (private life), and 13 (effective remedy) of the European Convention, ordering it to pay €100,000 to each man. In 2018 the Court issued nearly identical rulings against Romania (where al-Nashiri was held from 2004 to 2005) and Lithuania (where Abu Zubaydah was held from 2005 to 2006), ordering them to pay €100,000 and €100,000 plus €30,000 in costs, respectively.
The most unsettling detail: before arriving in Poland, Abu Zubaydah had been held at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, where — as established — he was subjected to waterboarding. That facility was run by Gina Haspel, who in 2018 was appointed Director of the CIA — the same institution that had run the torture program.
Legal commentary
The ECtHR rulings establish direct violations of Article 3 of the European Convention (an absolute prohibition on torture, non-derogable under any circumstances) and the UN Convention against Torture (CAT). In all four cases, the Court found that the host states knew — or should have known — what the detainees would be subjected to, making them directly responsible for the torture suffered on their own territory, not merely for logistical hosting.
Implications — symmetry test
This site has already documented, for Iran (Yemen: 73 UN staff still arbitrarily detained by the Houthis, as Hodeidah bleeds again), Russia (Mali: army and Russian Africa Corps mercenaries arrange a corpse into a swastika after killing four civilians), Israel (Israel allowed and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas for years — a month before October 7 it asked for more), and the United States (The United States armed the Syrian rebellion for five years, then shut down the program as a gift to Putin), how geopolitical calculation systematically prevails over the assessment of real consequences. Here the pattern applies to direct torture, not an armed proxy: the United States ran a systematic torture program, four European governments — not regimes commonly targeted by this site's accusations, but Western democracies — actively collaborated in it, and the woman who ran one of the harshest sites was later promoted to lead the very agency. No CIA official has ever been prosecuted in the United States for these acts; the accountability established by courts so far falls only on the European states that hosted the sites, not on those who ordered and carried out the torture itself.
Sources: HUDOC — European Court of Human Rights · Open Society Justice Initiative · Human Rights Watch · BBC · Lieber Institute, West Point