Maher Arar

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

The latest in a string of lawsuits challenging harsh interrogation techniques could fare better than similar cases.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Canadians seem so much more willing to apologize for their mistakes than Americans do.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a committee in Parliament is planning to recommend that the Canadian government compensate and apologize to three Arab-Canadian men who were imprisoned and tortured in Syria, due partly to information [...]

When I watched Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning of the government’s lawyer in the extraordinary rendition case of Arar v. Ashcroft in December, which I wrote about in detail Wednesday, I was struck by Sotomayor’s immediate grasp of the troubling implications of the government’s position.
As Sotomayor put it to Jonathan Cohn, the Justice Department [...]

The media have overlooked substance and context to focus on her style, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor has provided a window into her views on executive power and national security along the way.

Since my earlier post on Yaser Hamdi’s express agreement not to sue the United States for his indefinite detention and mistreatment, Cornell Law Professor Michael Dorf, who analyzed the Hamdi agreement shortly after it was reached, has provided a helpful clue as to why we may not be seeing more of these explicit waivers of [...]

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) is harping on CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta for saying that people were rendered for torture. “What evidence are you basing that on, or would you like to retract that?”
“The press has identified extraordinary renditions, but no one has quite defined it,” he says, offering a definition. First is “where individuals are [...]

As I wrote on Wednesday, there are already several lawsuits from torture victims pending against the United States, and some legal scholars predict many more to come. So what if an Obama-sponsored investigative commission set up a means for compensating torture victims? That could save the government a whole lot of money.
A slew of [...]