Thursday, December 01, 2005

Secret CIA Prisons

Mr Frattini, commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, said that under EU law, if reports of secret CIA jails were true, states would face "serious consequences, including the suspension of the right to vote in the council".

As I've noted elsewhere, one of the problems with overly stringent laws against torture, especially if they wind up forbidding reasonable methods of interrogation, is that it may wind up increasing the amount of torture that actually happens. If a country that is found to have a secret CIA jail is threatened with losing its rights in the Eeewww EU, these prisons will wind up being established in countries that don't care.

But how likely is a country to lose voting rights? Maybe not very.

A suspension of voting rights for a member country would take the EU into uncharted territory. It would require the unanimous backing of all the other member states plus the approval of the European Parliament, said an EU source familiar with the bloc's workings.

So if more than a couple of countries are worried that the same thing could happen to them, you won't get unanimity.

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