Is it reasonable to charge Donald Rumsfeld with torture? According to this news item from France’s Rue 89, with Rumsfeld visiting Paris this week, a coterie of human rights groups in Europe and the United States filed a complaint with Paris prosecutors. According to the article, “under French law, owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, his presence there obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.”
“Legally speaking, few complaints are as irrefutable as this one. Then there is the political aspect: this touches on the Bush Administration … But there should be impunity for no one.”
— Patrick Baudoin, French Lawyer Who Filed the Complaint
By Julien Martin
Translated by Andrew Levine
October 26, 2007
France – Rue89 – Original Article (French)
At three pages and with twenty-seven appendixes, the French complaint filed on Thursday by four human rights organizations against Donald Rumsfeld is detailed and damning. The former American Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 is accused of torture, in particular with respect to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
This is the fifth complaint against the man considered one of the architects of the Iraq War. Two criminal complaints were dismissed in Germany (the second, however, will be appealed next week) and two more have been filed, one in Argentina and one in Sweden.
But for the first time, Donald Rumsfeld has been legally assaulted while in the country in which the complaint was filed. Arriving in Paris on Thursday, he gave a lecture on Friday morning, without specifying the duration of his stay. Owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and enshrined in French law ten years later, his presence here obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.
In the French complaint, which Rue89 has obtained a copy of, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Human and Civil Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights intend, “to take all preliminary measures to ensure that this person is detained or else kept on French territory.”
Testimony from former detainees and American troops fills out the complaint, which lists the alleged interrogation methods: two-day-long periods of sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, sexual humiliation, and religion-related threats, among others.
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