Psyche, Science, and Society

Renditions in Africa

March 14th, 2007

U.S. allies in Africa may have engaged in secret prisoner renditions reports McClatchy.

A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia as many as 150 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here….

The prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they’re being held incommunicado, the groups charge.

The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups. They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism.

At least one of the transferees is an American citizen identified on a flight manifest as Amir Mohamed Meshar. Meshar was flown from Nairobi to Baidoa, the seat of Somalia’s transitional government, on Feb. 10, according to Islamic human-rights groups. His whereabouts, and those of 12 other detainees aboard that chartered flight, are unknown….

Representatives of Islamic groups who’d visited detainees in late January in their jail cells in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, said they’d spotted U.S. diplomatic vehicles outside the holding facilities. They also said some detainees had reported being questioned by U.S. law enforcement agents.

American human rights abuses spread throughout the world.

Entry Filed under: International Law, Rights and Liberties