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The Globalisation of Rendition and Secret Detention
I have been awarded a grant from the UK's Economomic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an 18-month study on the globalisation of rendition and secret detention.
Rendition involves the seizure of suspects from one sovereign territory and their illicit transfer to another. It operates outside of the confines of normal extradition procedures, is highly secretive, and frequently involves torture of detainees by agents of the recipient state. While it is generally assumed that rendition and proxy detention are US led, early evidence suggests that it may be a much more diffuse phenomenon. It also appears to be operating differently in the three regions most involved – Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
The research team will explore three key questions: is the global system of rendition and secret detention US-led, or is it a more diffuse system with distinct and partly autonomous regional sub-systems that serve specific local as well as US interests; are there any regional differences in the ways in which rendition and secret detention have developed and are operated; and can any specific evolutionary moments or shifts in teh development and operation of rendition and secret detention be identified.
Rendition and secret detention first came to light in 2002 with the detention of over 700 prisoners in the specially constructed US detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2004, the efforts of avid plane spotters and investigative journalists led to the identification of many repeated flights by a Gulfstream V turbojet with tail number N379P, in and out of countries that included Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, the USA, Germany, Sweden, Scotland and Cyprus. The jet was traced back to the CIA and was found to have been used to transfer detainees, kidnapped on behalf of the CIA, to secret detention facilities around the world known as ‘black sites’, where they could be held illicitly for the purposes of interrogation.
It therefore became clear that rendition and secret detention extend far beyond Guantánamo. The US Congress provided a sense of the scale of rendition and secret detention in August 2006 when it reported that 14000 people were being held without due process in secret locations by the security agencies of dozens of states worldwide, on behalf of the US. Many of thse were in Iraq.
The findings from this study may challenge public assumptions about rendition and secret detention as a US response to terrorism. While the development of a theoretical model to explain rendition will contribute to scholarly debate on security collaborations and state violence, it is hoped that the findings will also be of practical use to those agencies involved in the legal representation of victims of these illicit yet widespread phenomenon.
Dr Sam Raphael from the University of Kent will join me as the co-investigator for this study, which begins in January 2011. We will be collaborating with a number of leading human rights lawyers and NGOs in the US and the UK, including Cageprisoners, Amnesty International, Reprieve, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU, the International Justice Network, Human Rights Watch and the Center for Law and Security at NYU.
