Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January-June 2007 the international flight planning system demonstrated how the destination and departure points of some rendition flights were deliberately disguised. 3 - establish parliamentary and/or judicial oversight of both domestic and foreign intelligence agencies and other secret services operating on their territories; Both the 2006 and 2007 Council of Europe reports cited the involvement of European governments in specific cases of rendition. The report criticized Italian and German involvement in the illegal transfer of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, kidnapped in Milan, Italy in February 2003. - ensure that state secrecy cannot be used to shield “evidence concerning the civil, criminal or political liability of the State’s representatives for grave human rights violations”; - ensure that the victims of rendition and secret detention are fittingly rehabilitated and compensated; On the day the report was released, the trial opened in Milan of 25 CIA operatives, one US Air Force officer and seven members of the Italian security services, accused of involvement in Abu Omar’s abduction and rendition. For over a year, Italian prosecutors had been asking their government to request the extradition of the US operatives, but the Italian government had not agreed to do so, and the trial opened without any of the US defendants present. The trial was then suspended because the Italian government petitioned the court to drop the charges on the grounds that prosecutors had violated state secrecy laws in gathering evidence against the security services, including by using wiretaps and classified documents. The Constitutional Court will hear arguments on this petition, and was expected to rule in October. establish a “genuine European parliamentary inquiry mechanism” guided in particular “by the Canadian procedures followed in the case of Maher Arar and by national parliamentary inquiry procedures such as the rules of the German Bundestag commissions of inquiry providing for the possibility of the commission’s appointing a special investigator”; The Council of Europe report also discussed the case of German citizen Khalid el-Masri, who was apprehended in Macedonia and held there for three weeks before being flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. German authorities issued arrest warrants in January against 10 CIA agents implicated in Khaled el-Masri’s rendition. Prosecutors wanted the agents to be extradited to Germany to stand trial. US officials had made emphatically clear that if asked, they would refuse to extradite their nationals to stand trial in either Italy or Germany. The report’s key recommendations included urging European states to: Amnesty International - ensure that controls sufficient to prevent illegal detainee transfers are established over both civilian and state aircraft transiting European airspace. AI’s recommendations AI urges the members of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), its Committee of Ministers and the 47 member states to take concrete action to ensure that the truth about their involvement in secret detention and unlawful detainee transfers is revealed to the public, those responsible for human rights violations are brought to justice, and effective control is established over foreign and national security services, so that such abuses never happen again. In particular AI calls for the following actions to be taken:  The governments must ensure that the truth about unlawful activities carried out by national and foreign officials in their territory or elsewhere in the context of the US-led rendition and secret detention programme is exposed. AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007