Council of Europe anti-torture Committee visits the Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Council of Europe anti-torture Committee visits the Netherlands

coe.int

22 pointsTomte16 comments

> At the end of the visit, the delegation presented its preliminary observations to the authorities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Am I missing a link or something? This appears to describe the visits, but does not describe any conclusions nor observations.

For context [0], this is a regular visit, done 18 times a year across the COE's member countries, so for each country roughly every 4 years. (For extra extra context, the COE is a superset of the EU, which while not particularly binding serves more of a United Nations-like purpose, with a focus on human rights, democracy and rule-of-law.)

Intriguingly:

> The CPT [Committee for the Prevention of Torture] does not publish its visit report until the Government of the country concerned requests publication.

The committee encourages states to sign up for an automatic publication procedure for reports, but the Netherlands has not. I suppose this is still news, just more in the general announcement sense to the sort of people who'd regularly keep tabs on the CPT blog.

[0] https://www.coe.int/en/web/cpt/faqs

It doesn't make sense to think about the Council of Europe as a "superset of the EU" the thing they have in common is Europe, and thus the European flag (which symbolises Europe, not the EU, the Council, the EBU, the Paris MOU or any other political entity, treaty organisation or whatever, just Europe as an idea)

The Council is older, and has a much more limited purpose.

I don't think there is any implication of wrongdoing on the part of the Netherlands, looking at their news feed they seem to visit all European countries on a periodic basis.

Those reports take some time. You can find past reports for the Netherlands here: https://www.coe.int/en/web/cpt/netherlands

These are preliminary observations. I expect they are given only to the other party so that it can give a rebuttal, after which the final report is made.

I agree; somewhat unsatisfying as it stands. Especially since article nearly a month old.

Maybe they could turn their attention to the US? There are some CIA people in serious need of indictment. Fortunately there is no statute of limitations on torture. We know who they are. It would be a shame to wait until after they are dead.

What do you expect the Council of Europe to do in the US?

Punish the countries/individuals who hosted CIA torture prisons

The council has no ability to punish anybody. Its members are sovereign entities, and so they could punish individuals, or themselves, or each other, to some extent, but they likely won't.

Even more so than the UN, the Council of Europe is ultimately just a meeting between sovereign entities, it exists at their whim. Collectively the members would prefer to, at least on paper, adhere to certain rules which might prove inconvenient in practice. For example, on paper as a CoE member Russia did not have Capital Punishment or Torture. In principle Russians who annoyed Vladimir Putin could perhaps be imprisoned but not tortured or executed. In practice of course the Russian state continued to kill people, indeed including poisoning people in other countries, but it did so illegally. In March the Council kicked out Russia because invading another member country on a flimsy pretext was taking the piss.

Sanctions on US-EEZ trade.

That'd be the European Union, the Council of Europe is completely unrelated to that.

Did they ever found something ? Remember the secret CIA prisons ?

Ok? Why should we care?

We shouldn't, they regularly visit all countries.

The reason this is probably posted is that there was some noise on Twitter last year between someone from the council and the Dutch police. The council person had jumped to conclusions on some Twitter "evidence" that turned out to be a video that wasn't from the day and thing it was claimed to be from and they hadn't verified this before tweeting.

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