Amnesty: The suspension of human rights by the US authorities as part of its "war on terror" was obviously not working, Amnesty International's secretary-general for Ireland said at the launch of the organisation's annual report in Dublin yesterday.
"If the world superpower throws out the rules, then there are no rules," Colm Ó Cuanacháin told a news conference. He called on the US administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, disclose human rights abuses and restate its commitment to the complete ban on torture.
Commenting on the alleged use of "rendition" flights by the US to transport prisoners, he said that, in the words of radical academic Noam Chomsky, "rendition is another word for torture".
While the Government said it had received assurances from the US, "these diplomatic assurances are not written down, that we know of". He added: "In terms of the law, these assurances mean nothing." He said the Government had to "put in place a mechanism to measure and observe and monitor" the Shannon flights for possible renditions.
Governments in the EU had been "exposed as somehow collaborating and co-operating" with this process, as had the governments of Yemen, Egypt and Jordan, he said.
Former Department of Foreign Affairs secretary general Noel Dorr said his private view on searching the planes for prisoners was that, after all the representations made by the Government to the US authorities, "you would probably find that there was nothing to find".
Asked if he believed Shannon airport had, in fact, been used as a transit point for transporting prisoners, Mr Dorr said: "I just don't know." From reading the newspapers there seemed to be "some evidence" that aircraft involved in renditions elsewhere might have passed through.
But the US, "at a very, very high level", including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had assured the Government that no prisoners were being brought through Shannon. The US was "a country with which we are enormously friendly" and he could see "very, very great difficulties" if the Government were now to say, in effect, "I don't believe you" and search the planes.
Speaking on the human rights situation in Africa, Lesotho's ambassador to Ireland, Mannete M Ramaili, said that, while some significant strides had been made in other parts of the world, "the story of Africa was and continues to be pathetic". She added that "50 per cent of Lesotho lives below the poverty line" and a total of 300,000 adults were infected with HIV-Aids.
Despite all these difficulties, Lesotho had met its debt repayments while other countries were having their debts forgiven. "It [ Lesotho] got punished for managing its debt well," she said. "What is the incentive for total compliance?"
Commenting on the recent St Patrick's Cathedral stand-off involving asylum-seekers, Mr Ó Cuanacháin said it was a signal that the Department of Justice "simply must address the inadequacies and the weaknesses that are in the process" whereby people were left "waiting for years".