Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Ashamu

We're delighted to welcome Elizabeth Ashamu (right), who provides today's guest post below on her work seeking justice for victims of extraordinary rendition in the African human rights system.
A third-year law student at NYU School of Law, Elizabeth is a Root-Tilden-Kern and Institute for International Law and Justice scholar. Her academic and professional work has focused on human rights in Africa. She holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in African Studies from Yale University.
Before law school, work on human rights, transitional justice and natural resource management took her to Togo, Rwanda, Liberia and Cameroon. As a law student, Elizabeth was a founding member and the first president of the NYU African Law Association. She has spent time in Southern Sudan researching post-conflict forest governance, and she interned with the Special Court for Sierra Leone at its Hague office. Her interest in strengthening democratic processes in Africa led her to serve as legal advisor with the Carter Center’s election observation mission for Guinea’s presidential elections and as an observer for the Southern Sudan referendum on self-determination.
Elizabeth looks forward to working with Human Rights Watch after her graduation, as its 2011-2012 NYU Fellow.
Heartfelt welcome!

African Commission challenge to CIA rendition

(Many thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me to contribute this guest post)

On the night of December 26, 2003, Mohamed al-Asad (right) was apprehended at his home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, blindfolded and driven away. (photo credit) Early the next morning, he was placed into a small plane and expelled to Djibouti—a country entirely unfamiliar to him. There, he was held in a secret detention facility, subjected to torture and inhuman treatment and interrogated by an American agent. Two weeks later, he was taken to an airport, where he experienced what are now easily recognized as the standard operating procedures of a U.S. rendition team—a group of individuals dressed in black stripped him naked, then photographed, assaulted, diapered and chained him. Forced onto waiting plane, he was dispatched into a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and later jailed in his native Yemen. He was finally released in 2006, without ever being charged with a terrorism-related offence.
As a student advocate in the Global Justice Clinic at the New York University School of Law, I have worked to represent Mr. al-Asad with a team of other students and the human rights organization, Interights. Seeking redress for the human rights violations perpetrated against our client, we filed a complaint against Djibouti before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. It is the first case ever to come before the African Commission regarding the involvement of an African state in the U.S. extraordinary rendition and secret detention program.
The African Commission was seized of the matter, and requested arguments on admissibility, which we submitted on February 28, 2011. The Commission will ask the government of Djibouti to lodge a formal response, to which Mr. al-Asad may reply. The Commission will then determine whether the case fulfills the requirements for admissibility under article 56 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. If found admissible, the Commission will hear arguments on the merits.
In his declaration to the African Commission, Mr. al-Asad stated,

The continued denial of my abuse frustrates my ability to regain my life, my community stature, and my sense of justice.

We hope that his case will contribute to exposing the global complicity in rights violations linked to U.S. counterterrorism initiatives.
Like other regional and international human rights bodies, the African Commission requires a complainant to exhaust domestic remedies. Given that Mr. al-Asad could not access Djiboutian courts while detained and dares not return, domestic remedies have been unavailable, impractical and insufficient. Our arguments rely on the growing jurisprudence of the African Commission, which—like the European Court—has shown flexibility when circumstances demonstrate that it would be futile, overly burdensome or simply impossible for a complainant to exhaust all imaginable avenues for recourse within a national jurisdiction.
In Recontre Africaine pour la Defence des Droits de l’Homme v. Zambia (1997), for example, the Commission found that the possible recourse presented by the respondent state “was as a practical matter not available” for the 517 West Africans illegally expelled after being detained without access to attorneys. In Dawda K. Jawara v. The Gambia (2000), the Commission deemed local remedies unavailable for the complainant who, like our client, could not return to the respondent state to pursue them “because of a generalized fear for his life.”
In 2009, through a letter to the Attorney General submitted on behalf of Mr. al-Asad, we informed Djibouti of the facts of his case; however, to our knowledge no investigations were ever initiated. It is our position that the African Commission should follow the spirit of its previous decisions and require no more action of Mr. al-Asad to demonstrate exhaustion.
The substantive allegations contained in the initial complaint (which we will further elaborate in arguments on the merits) are that Djibouti, a state party to the African Charter since 1991, violated articles 5, 6, 7 and 12, among others:
► Mr. al-Asad’s secret and incommunicado detention and expulsion contravened the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under article 5. Additionally, Djibouti violated the principle of non-refoulement by transferring Mr. al-Asad to Afghanistan, despite the clear risks that further article 5 violations would be perpetrated there.
► Article 6 sets out that “no one may be arbitrarily arrested or detained,” yet Mr. al-Asad was held without being informed of any charges against him.
► Although article 7 assures the right to a fair trial, Mr. al-Asad never had access to legal counsel and was never brought before a judge.
► The requirement of article 12 that foreigners like M. al-Asad “may only be expelled…by virtue of a decision taken in accordance with the law” was equally illusory.
These human rights implications of the CIA secret detention and rendition program have been well established and documented by a wide variety of international organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations.
► The complaint also alleges that Djibouti violated its duty to protect the family under article 18 of the Charter. In a supporting declaration submitted to the Commission, Zahra Mohamed tells of her husband’s arrest and of her tireless search for him, including the filing of an unsuccessful habeas petition in Tanzanian courts and a tracing request with the ICRC. She said:

I had to know whether he was dead or alive. ... It was terrible to live with the uncertainty.

She was pregnant when he was apprehended at their home in Tanzania, gave birth during his absence,and struggled to support herself and their four other children. Her ordeal illustrates vividly one aspect of the gendered impact of counterterrorism programs, highlighted in the 2009 report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism.
Although Mr. al-Asad only spent two weeks in Djibouti, as his entryway into the U.S. secret detention program, the nation played a critical role in facilitating his subsequent abuse. Home to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and approximately 2,300 American troops, Djibouti is an important U.S. ally and a cornerstone of counter-terror activities on the continent. Its human rights record is dismal—most recently illustrated by the arrest and detention of hundreds of demonstrators, including Noël Abdi, the president of the foremost domestic human rights organization (see more here).
Al-Asad v. Djibouti presents an important opportunity for an African institution to expose the complicity of an African state in the U.S. counter-terrorism program, to enforce the obligations of a state party to the African Charter, and to provide redress for the human rights violations that occurred on African soil.

Mixed week on renditions accountability

This week saw two contrasting results emerging from courts in the United States and Italy regarding extraordinary rendition:

► In the United States, the case of Maher Arar (right) was once more rejected by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (prior IntLawGrrls posts here)

► In Italy, however, 23 CIA agents were convicted in absentia in relation to their involvement in the ‘snatching’ of Egyptian Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from the streets of Milan in 2003. (prior IntLawGrrls posts here and here)

The contrast in the courts’ approaches in these cases could hardly be more pronounced.
In Arar (opinion available here), the Court refused to allow Canadian national Maher Arar to sue the United States for sending him to Syria where he was tortured because Congress had never expressly authorised such suits. Arar therefore failed to create what is known as a Bivens action, i.e. an action for breach of constitutional rights, in relation to extraordinary rendition. This was because, the Court held, the creation of a Bivens action in this respect would have implications of foreign policy and security activity. Congress could, of course, create such an action by statute but the Court would not do so itself. There is little doubt that this will be appealed.
In Italy, in contrast, Judge Oscar Magi of the Fourth Chamber of the Court of Milan appeared to have little hesitation in convicting the 23 Americans for their involvement in rendition although there were a number of others who were not convicted as a result of diplomatic immunity and the withholding of evidence on national security grounds. This case is sure to be appealed, and no sentences are executed in Italy until all appeals are completed, but in any case the agents are not in custody. The US State Department expressed its disappointment at the verdict.
What is striking to me is the contrast in the approach of the courts in both of these cases. Although the Italian decision is available only in Italian and I am therefore relying on newspaper reports, it would appear that the judge was not swayed by arguments relating to the institutional appropriateness of judicial decision-making on matters of this nature. These kinds of arguments are often made in order to try to insulate so-called ‘security’ or ‘foreign affairs’ activity from judicial oversight and scrutiny, the claim being that deciding on such matters could have foreign affairs implications and is therefore inappropriate as foreign affairs are an executive function. Certainly these kinds of arguments seem to have formed part of the decision-making in the Second Circuit’s decision in Arar.
Where these kinds of arguments are acceded to there is the danger that executive action becomes absolutely unimpeachable through judicial means and maintenance and re-establishment of the rule of law is therefore reliant on parliamentary (or so-called ‘democratic’) accountability mechanisms which, as I argue here in contradistinction to my co-author Fergal Davis, I am simply not convinced can work.

As a fan of judicial muscularity in relation to security-motivated counter-terrorist action I would certainly favour the approach of the Italian court to that of the 2nd Circuit.

(Cross posted at Human Rights in Ireland)

Go On! Detention & Rendition at LSE

(Go on is an occasional item on symposia of interest) On May 6th this year the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics will hold a day-long symposium entitled 'Detention and Rendition in the "War on Terror"'.
Full details of the symposium are available here, and the day will feature sessions on the range of human rights implicated in detention and rendition, international relations perspectives on detention and rendition, possibilities for reform of current policies and practices, and perspectives on creating effective links between academia and action/activism in this area.
The speakers are drawn from the academy (law and international relations), practice, and policy/NGO and I am very pleased to be included among them.
Attendance at the symposium is free and open to all. The only requirement is to pre-register with the organiser, Elizabeth Stubbins Bates, at e.t.stubbins-bates[at]lse.ac.uk before the 30th of April.

On October 8

On this day in ...
... 2008 (today), is marked the annual International Day for Disaster Reduction. The U.N. General Assembly set aside the 2d Wednesday of October to raise awareness of ways that humans can reduce the suffering that results from natural disasters. Efforts are coordinated by the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, working in conjunction with the World Bank and the World Health Organization. This year the day "falls on the third anniversary of the massive 2005 South Asian Earthquake that devastated a whole region of Pakistan."
... 2002, at 3 a.m. at the Manhattan detention center where U.S. officials had held him since his September 26 arrest at JFK airport on his way from Zurich back home to Ottawa, Maher Arar, a 30-something tech worker, was chained and placed on a private jet that hopscotches 3 continents before landing in Amman, Jordan. Soon Arar, a Canadian citizen, would find himself in the birthplace from which he and his from which he and his family had emigrated when he was 17 -- Syria. There, for nearly a year he endured brutal interrogation, notwithstanding multiple visits to him by the Canadian consul. Syrian officials released Arar in October 2003. As IntLawGrrls posted here and here, Canada eventually paid $10.3 million and apologized to Arar for its role in his extraordinary rendition. (credit for photo of Arar and family in Canada) In the United States, meanwhile, the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, which had rejected Arar's lawsuit, agreed to rehear the matter. According to the Boston Globe,

the move ... was unusual not only because the full circuit assembles for a case only once or twice a year, but because Maher Arar's attorneys had yet to even ask for a full hearing.

Diplomatic Assurances: A Structural Weakness in Human Rights Law?

As the Bush administration’s time in office comes to a close, it seems appropriate to start to reflect on the impact that policies pursued by this administration have had on law. These impacts have been plentiful and extend far beyond the realm of the United States into both international law and into the law and policies of other countries. From an Irish perspective the issue of transit states’ liabilities relating to extraordinary rendition has been particularly germane. This results from the fact that the United States has been given fly-over rights and been permitted to use Shannon Airport for the purposes of stop-over, refuelling etc., as indicated below. (image courtesy of the Council of Europe and Irish Council for Civil Liberties)

The concern in Ireland — shared by the European Union and the Council of Europe — is that these rights may have implicated Ireland in the practice of extraordinary rendition. As the European Convention on Human Rights is part of Irish domestic law (through the ECHR Act 2003), Ireland’s non-refoulement obligation might be called into question here and, to that end, the Irish government has sought and received comprehensive diplomatic assurances ("D.A.s") from the US government that no individuals have been, are being, or will be ‘rendered’ through Irish airspace. This has resulted in a quite concerted debate in Ireland about whether diplomatic assurances can ever satisfy a state’s obligation of non-refoulement under Article 3 of the ECHR.

In some recent work, forthcoming in the Irish Yearbook of International Law, I argue that diplomatic assurances can satisfy Article 3 provided they fulfil four criteria gleaned from case law:

► 1. The promise must be adequate;

► 2. The promisor must have effective control over the relevant circumstances;

► 3. The promisor must be credible in relation to the matter at hand; and

► 4. The Diplomatic Assurance must be capable in practice of protecting the individual(s).

For a human rights lawyer it is, of course, somewhat uncomfortable to argue that D.A.s can satisfy a state’s obligation to protect individuals from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and states’ practice in accepting such assurances arguably call that state’s real commitment to rights-protection into question. However, and this is really the gist of my argument in the IYIL piece, this exposes a structural difficulty with human rights law as much (if not more) than it does a political difficulty with state practice. In this respect, it may be more productive for us to parse judgments and principles to expose these weaknesses than to assert that D.A.s are not in fact acceptable in law.

The fact that the non-refoulement obligation, which is absolute in the ECHR, can be fulfilled through diplomatic practice rather than through effective rights protection perhaps exposes a weakness in human rights law that we can now focus on trying to mitigate, as perhaps the European Court of Human Rights has tried to do by seeming to raise the standards for satisfaction in the recent case of Saadi v Italy (judgment; case note; prior post).

Territory v. Control Redux: On the Dismissal of Maher Arar's Lawsuit v. U.S. Officials

As many readers may know, Canadian citizen of Syrian origin Maher Arar (below right, photo credit) was "abducted" in 2002 while transiting at Kennedy Airport in New York and "rendered" to Syria, where he was tortured. A Canadian commission inquiry revealed that Canadian officials had misinformed US officials; the Canadians therefore apologized and paid Arar roughly $10.3 million. In addition, as Jaya Ramji-Nogales posted, his case figured prominently in the Canadian Federal Court's assessment that the United States does not comply adequately with Article 33 of the UN Refugee Convention, which prohibits return to persecution, or Article 3 of the UN Convention against Torture (CAT), which also prohibits refoulement. Nonetheless, US Legal Advisor John B. Bellinger III announced last month (with respect to the US practice of obtaining diplomatic assurances from countries known to torture prisoners) that in keeping with its obligations under article 3 of the CAT, the US does not transfer prisoners to countries that torture. He emphasized, however, that the non-refoulement provision applies only to persons actually in the United States. Apparently agreeing with him, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Arar cannot sue United States officials for damages because he was never technically within US territory. Isn't the airport transit zone, just like the Guantánamo naval base, under the complete control of the United States and therefore US "territory" for purposes of the Convention as well as for habeas corpus?

'Nuff said ... "isn't it?"

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes.)

BOULTON: [T]here are those who would say, look, let's take Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and rendition and all those things, and to them that is the, you know, the complete opposite of freedom.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course if you want to slander America, you can look at it one way. But you go down -- what you need to do -- I think I suggested you do this at a press conference -- if you go down to Guantanamo and take a look at how these prisoners are treated -- and they're working it through our court systems. We are a land of law.
BOULTON: But the Supreme Court have just said that -- you know, ruled against what you've been doing down there.
THE PRESIDENT: But the district court didn't. And the appellate court didn't.
BOULTON: The Supreme Court is supreme, isn't it?

-- Sky News Political Editor Adam Boulton speaking in London with U.S. President George W. Bush. (photo credit) Full interview here.

Rendition on Trial

The trial of 26 Americans and several former top Italian intelligence officials for the 2003 extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and torture) of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (aka Abu Omar) has finally opened in Milan. As you may recall, in 2003, American intelligence officers grabbed Nasr off the street in Milan and rushed him off to Egypt where, as his wife testified on Wednesday, he was tortured in an attempt to gain information about his possible terrorist connections. The Bush administration has of course refused to extradite the Americans responsible for the rendition (25 CIA agents and 1 Air Force colonel), and the Italian government has done its share of stalling to avoid trial, claiming that prosecutors exercised too much zeal in intercepting the CIA agents' phone calls, for example. Why would they do so? After all, this particular rendition created fury among many in Italian law enforcement by snatching Nasr out from under surveillance that had them on the brink of obtaining much more valuable (and reliable) information about Muslim groups in Italy than Nasr's alleged torture in Egypt could provide. Politics as usual: Silvio Berlusconi (left) was Prime Minister when the rendition took place and his recent reelection means keeping a lid on any evidence of collusion with the Americans that might harm his new government. One of the Italian defendants, Nicolò Pollari (former director of the military intelligence agency) claims that both Berlusconi and former Prime Minister Romano Prodi have information that would prove he at the very least knew nothing of the kidnapping, and may have actually opposed it. Meanwhile, defense lawyers tried to challenge Nasr's wife's reliability as a witness, claiming that her veil indicates anti-American bias!

21st C. turn of an Arendtian phrase

"Memo to the next president" is the title of Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten's commentary about how hard it will be for the administration that takes office on January 20, 2009, to get the United States out of the complex mess that's typically subsumed within the single word "Guantánamo" -- how hard it will be, that is, for the United States to pull back from abusive rendition-and-detention-for-interrogation policies pursued since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and yet to work effectively to combat terrorism. Essential to Rutten's exposé is a critique of "torture memos" like those discussed in posts here and here. He writes:

America's version of banal evil lurks in the bloodless abstractions of mid-level lawyers, rather than in the gray efficiency of faceless bureaucrats.

The reference, of course, is to a term coined fully 45 years ago, in the trial reportage compiled into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (left). As described in this post, Banality philosopher Hannah Arendt's account of that early effort by a nation-state, Israel, to prosecute an individual in its national courts for internationally condemned crimes. In describing actions "so obscene in their nature and consequences" as "'banal,'" it's explained here, Arendt

meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. ...

For a time after 9/11, the use of words from a totalitarian past to describe the American present instant sparked controversy. Recall, for example, the furor in 2005 over Amnesty International's characterization of detention practices as an "American gulag." That harsh criticism now receives due consideration in the mainstream media -- indeed, as in Rutten's case, is set forth in the mainstream media -- is an advance in our avowedly open society. But that there remains cause for that criticism is no advance at all.

Eradicating abusive policies and, at least as importantly, the institutional structures within which they found root, indeed must be a priority item on the next President's to-do list.

(cross-posted at Slate's Convictions blog)

Commander in Chief, yes, but not of all of us

At Thursday's Democratic Presidential debate the candidates were asked about qualifications "to be commander in chief." Sen. Barack Obama's response hewed closely to military matters. In contrast, the response of Sen. Hillary Clinton ranged farther afield. She spoke of her role as wife of President Bill Clinton: of traveling to "80 countries," of "negotiat[ing] on matters such as opening borders for refugees during the war in Kosovo," and of "stand[ing] up for women's rights as human rights around the world." She spoke too of her role as U.S. Senator: of "serv[ing] on the Senate Armed Services Committee," of "work[ing] as one of the leaders in the Congress on behalf of Homeland Security."
Gotta problem with all that?
Well, the Constitution might. Here in full is the Commander in Chief Clause of Article II:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; ....

"Commander in Chief," therefore, is a term that relates to the military, to the use of the armed forces. "Commander in Chief" isn't a catchall for foreign policy, certainly not for diplomacy or what in international law is called the pacific settlement of disputes. The powers pertaining to those matters are more properly sited elsewhere in the Constitution -- in that part of Article 2 that lets the President "require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments," perhaps, or that which grants the President a portion of the powers to make treaties and name ambassadors. Then there're the grant of power to receive other states' ambassadors, and requirement that the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed ...."
As laudable as that act of as 1st Lady was, giving a speech on human rights is not an act to be subsumed within the Constitution's Commander in Chief Clause.
To ask for precision on this point is not to quibble. It is, rather, to underscore a distinction that makes a difference. Shoehorning all of the United States' foreign relations into the term "Commander in Chief" is a risky business. It increases the danger of jumping to military solutions for problems best resolved by other, less forcible measures. It tempts some politicians to obscure military inexperience with militaristic misadventure. It risks reinforcement of all-too-quick and oh-so-wrong assumptions that national security is something apart from, something at odds with, the security of human beings.
Criticizing the current President's misapprehension of the term was a superb op-ed that historian Garry Wills published a full year ago in The New York Times. He put the problem succinctly: "[T]he president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army."
Wills proceeded to link misapprehension of that term to the Nixon-era firing of special prosecutors appointed to investigate Watergate and, more recently, to what he called the "fetishistic ... secrecy" that's enabled the current administration to obscure extraordinary renditions and other excesses of its post-September 11 campaign against terrorism. Wills wrote:

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, 'commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.' That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just 'commander in chief,' or even 'commander in chief of the United States.' This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline.

That's wrongheaded thinking, Wills concluded:

The representative is accountable to citizens. Soldiers are accountable to their officer. The dynamics are different, and to blend them is to undermine the basic principles of our Constitution.

It's time for all who would be President to endeavor to honor these principles, in what they say and, should they win election, in what they do.

New Philippine Antiterrorism Law

The Philippines’ new terrorism law (The Human Security Act of 2007) looks good on its face; the devil is in the details. While it purportedly limits police custody to 3 days and prohibits both rendition and the admissibility of testimony obtained through torture, exceptions and broad language make the law yet another enabler of human rights abuse. As Human Rights Watch points out, the overly broad definition of terrorism combined with a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years imprisonment without parole open the door to overly harsh punishment of minor violations. In addition, what Article 18 gives by limiting police custody to 3 days is taken away by Article 19, which allows for extending that period indefinitely in cases of “actual or imminent terrorist attack” if the police obtain written approval from either a court a “municipal, city, provincial or regional official.” According to HRW, not only is mistreatment in detention a serious problem in the Philippines, but authorities there also are known to hold suspects for long periods without arraignment or trial. The new law thus may legitimate these practices, despite the one positive aspect of the new law: its ban on using torture, threats, or coercion against detainees, which provides that evidence obtained through such practices is inadmissible in judicial and administrative proceedings. The new law also bans rendition, but the ban is subject to exceptions that allow for handing over a detainee without formal extradition proceedings if his/her testimony is needed in a terrorism-related trial or police investigation. The law authorizes the practice of obtaining diplomatic assurances that “rendees” will not be tortured. Following the lead of the UK, US and Canada, many countries have embraced this practice, which has been denounced by the UN Special Rapporteur on torture as offering inadequate protection against torture. Philippine activists and former Vice President Teofisto Guingona have asked the Supreme Court to strike down the new law, fearing it will turn a lively democracy into a police state and ruin chances of making peace with Communist rebels.

Close Gitmo: New Episode

Following overnight news of an on-then, off-now high-level Friday meeting, reports that the Bush Administration may be reaching a consensus to close its detention center at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Stay tuned whether the plan calls for closing not only Guantánamo, but also "Guantánamo"; that is, the complex of interrogation, detention, and rendition policies that span the globe and now associated with that one, once geographically situated, word.

On May 23, ...

... 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was established, and its Parliamentary Council promulgated the Grundgesetz ("Basic Law"), which declares in Article 1: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority." Aspects of this Constitution were amended in 1990, when, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall the preceding year, the eastern part of the country, which had been part of the Soviet bloc since the end of World War II, reunited with its western half.
... 1960, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced the capture of the mastermind of the deportation of 3 million Jews to concentration camps during the Nazi era, Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been seized in Argentina, where he was living under an assumed name. As depicted at left and reported in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt, Israel eventually put Eichmann on trial for crimes against the Jewish people; he was convicted and hanged. His kidnapping by Israeli agents prompted diplomatic protest from Argentina; the U.N. Security Council settled the dispute by resolution. A California-based member of Congress now is citing Eichmann to justify extraordinary renditions, the Bush Administration's post-September 11 policy of extralegal seizures of terrorism suspects.