European Court of Human Rights Judgment: El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

[European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Image by CherryX via Wikimedia Commons] [European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Image by CherryX via Wikimedia Commons]

European Court of Human Rights Judgment: El-Masri v. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[On 13 December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights issued a unanimous ruling in El-Masri v Macedonia, which condemns the role played by Macedonian officials in assisting the CIA`s "extraordinary rendition" of German citizen Khaled el-Masri. He was detained while traveling through Macedonia on 31 December 2003, held incommunicado for twenty-three days at the Americans` request, then turned over to the CIA at the Skopje airport. Under the watch of Macedonian officials, el-Masri was severely beaten, sodomized with a tranquilizer, shackled, and hooded by a CIA rendition team. From there, he was transported to Afghanistan and imprisoned in the black site known as the Salt Pit for five months. Although the US is not subject to the jurisdiction of the ECHR, this decision is an important condemnation of the CIA`s torture and kidnapping program in the "war on terror," as well as a rebuke of US courts for failing to provide any manner of justice to el-Masri or other victims of US torture.]

Final Rulings

The Court unanimously: 

  1. Dismisses the Government’s preliminary objection of non-compliance with the six-month rule;
  2. Declares the complaints under Articles 3, 5, 8 and 13 of the Convention admissible and the remainder of the application inadmissible;
  3. Holds that there has been a violation of Article 3 of the Convention in its procedural aspect on account of the failure of the respondent State to carry out an effective investigation into the applicant’s allegations of ill- treatment;
  4. Holds that there has been a violation of Article 3 of the Convention by the respondent State on account of the inhuman and degrading treatment to which the applicant was subjected while being held in the hotel in Skopje;
  5. Holds that the respondent State is responsible for the ill-treatment to which the applicant was subjected at Skopje Airport and that this treatment must be classified as torture within the meaning of Article 3 of the Convention;
  6. Holds that the responsibility of the respondent State is engaged with regard to the applicant’s transfer into the custody of the United States authorities despite the existence of a real risk that he would be subjected to further treatment contrary to Article 3 of the Convention;
  7. Holds that the applicant’s detention in the hotel for twenty-three days was arbitrary, in breach of Article 5 of the Convention;
  8. Holds that the respondent State is responsible under Article 5 of the Convention for the applicant’s subsequent captivity in Afghanistan;
  9. Holds that the respondent State failed to carry out an effective investigation into the applicant’s allegations of arbitrary detention, as required under Article 5 of the Convention;
  10. Holds that there has been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention;
  11. Holds that there has been a violation of Article 13 of the Convention on account of the lack of effective remedies in respect of the applicant’s grievances under Articles 3, 5 and 8 of the Convention;
  12. Hold (a) that the respondent State is to pay the applicant, within three months, EUR 60,000 (sixty thousand euros), plus any tax that may be chargeable, in respect of non-pecuniary damage; (b) that from the expiry of the above-mentioned three months until settlement simple interest shall be payable on the above amount at a rate equal to the marginal lending rate of the European Central Bank during the default period plus three percentage points;
  13. Dismisses the remainder of the applicant’s claim for just satisfaction.

[Click here to download the full judgment.] 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412