Human rights abuses

The CIA tortured al-Qaeda suspects "until the point of death" by drowning them in water-filled baths, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported on Sept. 8, ahead of the publication of a U.S. Senate report on interrogation techniques.

A total of 2,593 people, including civilians as well as Ukrainian and separatist combatants, have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine since it erupted in mid-April, a senior U.N. human rights official said on Aug. 29.
 

The trial of ex-soldier Marinko Bjelica, accused of the killings and torture of Bosniak civilians detained at a school in Kalinovik, heard that the defendant hit a prisoner “only because he was Muslim”.

The family of a young Istanbul architect who committed suicide in 2010 after being subjected to police torture has submitted an individual complaint to Turkey’s Constitutional Court, after the Council of State approved a decision that rejected the relatives’ appeal regarding “insufficient punishment for police officers.”

The CIA has conceded that it had improperly monitored computers used by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in an investigation of interrogation tactics and secret prisons for terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

An EU task force report announcing prosecutions of senior Kosovo Liberation Army members for crimes against humanity after the 1999 war could end impunity, said human rights group Amnesty International.  

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has announced a list of twelve US citizens barred from entering Russia for violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms.

Among them are people involved in tortures in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons. The first Russian "Guantanamo list" of 18 names was made public in 2013, Itar-Tass reports.

BELGRADE – Using the occasion of the UN International Day in Support of Torture, June 26, Serbian Protector of Citizens Sasa Jankovic has said that there is no torture as systematically organized phenomena in Serbia, but there are individual cases of abuse that competent authorities have tolerated.

Brussels must press Belgrade during EU accession talks to end impunity for war crimes committed by its forces during the 1990s, Amnesty International urged in a new report.

"Thousands of troops withdraw, tens of thousands remain"

BELGRADE -- Russia withdrew several thousand troops from the border with Ukraine, but tens of thousands still remain there, said an unnamed NATO official.