Early 2004 photos emerged in the media showing Iraqi prisoners allegedly being abused and tortured by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. The impact was devastating and the Bush administration, already under fire by critics for the way it handled the Iraq war, was faced with yet another serious public relations [...]

In November 2003 Dutch Military Intelligence tortured dozens of prisoners in the Iraq province of Al Muthanna. Al Muthanna was under British command at the time. The Dutch did not have an official mandate to interrogate prisoners. Torture consisted of keeping prisoners awake by throwing cold water on them and the use of high-frequency noise [...]

Peter Finn writes in the Washington Post that despite the Russian government’s problematic relationship with the rule of law, it has actually been quite good at complying with rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, aka Strasbourg. Of course, it would have to: Since 2002, the court has issued 362 judgements concerning Russia; 352 [...]

This much is uncontroversial: in late 2003 the CIA kidnapped Khalid al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, and carried him off to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation. In the end they released him when they realised that his only crime was to have the same name as some other man they wanted to get [...]

As you consider the ongoing saga of US treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, spare a thought for Wolfgang Daschner. As I wrote in an earlier post, Daschner, Frankfurt’s former deputy police commissioner, faced trial for threatening one Magnus G?fgen with torture. G?fgen had kidnapped young Jakob von Metzler, and the police [...]