Investigator who uncovered collusion between Europe and the US in a network of secret prisons

The Swiss lawyer and politician Dick Marty, who has died aged 78 from pancreatic cancer, played a key role in the human rights work of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. As its rapporteur, he uncovered how European countries had colluded in a “global spider’s web” of illegal US detentions and human rights abuses, secret jails and flight transfers of terrorist suspects stretching from Asia to Guantánamo Bay.

The existence of a network of secret prisons was identified in his reports in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe (the 46-member organisation set up in 1949 to uphold the rule of law in Europe), and was later acknowledged by the US authorities. The European court of human rights subsequently found that several states, including Italy, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland and Romania, had been complicit in the CIA secret detainee programme and thus had violated the European human rights convention.

This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.