BRITAIN: The British government is guilty of breaking international law if it allowed secret CIA "rendition" flights of terror suspects to land at UK airports, according to a report by American legal scholars.
Merely giving permission for the flights to refuel while en route to the Middle East to collect a prisoner would constitute a breach of the law, according to the opinion commissioned by an all-party group of British MPs, which meets in the Westminster parliament for the first time today. The report comes as US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice arrives in Europe for a trip that has been overshadowed by the growing dispute about the CIA's use of rendition - the term used to describe the abduction of suspects who are taken to countries where they can be questioned outside the protection of US law.
Several European governments, as well as the EU, have launched investigations into hundreds of CIA flights which have shuttled through the continent. Fresh revelations in Germany at the weekend show that CIA aircraft have landed in the country on 437 occasions. The Washington Post also reported that dozens of prisoners had been wrongly taken under rendition, with some kidnapped in their home countries and held incommunicado for weeks.
Ms Rice has promised to clarify the issue. Yesterday, however, US officials made it clear she was likely to respond robustly to any questioning from European leaders. "We do not move people around the world so they can be tortured," Stephen Hadley, the White House's adviser, said yesterday, pledging that the Bush administration would deal with the issue "in a comprehensive way". In briefings officials said Ms Rice would remind European ministers that their governments had co-operated in anti-terror operations with the US.
The all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, with representatives from the three main parties, was formed after the Guardian reported in September that aircraft operated by the CIA had flown in and out of civilian airports and RAF bases in the UK at least 210 times since September 11th, 2001. A report for the group by New York University's school of law's centre for human rights and global justice, concluded: "A state which aids or assists another state in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so."
The authors believe the government could face legal sanctions because of the UK's support.
Ms Rice, who meets German chancellor Angela Merkel today, is also facing tough questions about reports of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe.