Poland appeals CIA prison ruling

Poland's prosecutor-general said earlier this week that an appeal was being prepared on procedural grounds, but gave no details.

In the judgment in July, the Strasbourg judges had held Poland partly responsible for the ill-treatment of two terror suspects, ordering Warsaw to pay them 100,000 euros ($126,580) in damages.

Suspected al Qaeda operatives Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn - also known as Abu Zubaydah - had brought the case against Poland, accusing Warsaw of aiding and abetting in their rendition and mistreatment in 2002-2003. They are currently being held by the US at Guantanamo.

The court had ruled that the Polish government was complicit in human rights abuses carried out by CIA operatives at a so-called "black site," allegedly part of a network of secret military prisons built by the US in Eastern and Central Europe after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The black site was located on a Polish military facility in a village called Stare Kiejkuty, located 180 kilometers (111 miles) north-east of Warsaw.

The ruling stated that the Polish Government had failed to comply with their obligations, as they had refused to provide the Court with certain evidence. The Court also ruled that Poland should seek to remove the risk that the terror suspects might be sentenced to death, by seeking assurances from the US authorities that such penalty will not be imposed.

Although the judges said in July that "it was unlikely that the Polish officials had witnessed or known exactly what happened inside this facility," it argued that they had enabled the CIA to operate the facility.

"For all practical purposes, Poland had facilitated the whole process, had created the conditions for it to happen and had made no attempt to prevent it from occurring," the court wrote in its ruling.

To this day Poland denies CIA prisons ever existed on its soil.

rg/jr (dpa, Reuters)