The US Ambassador to Ireland should be called to appear before an Oireachtas committee to discuss his CIA's use of Irish airspace, Fine Gael said today.
The party's spokesman on foreign affairs Bernard Allen said he would today ask the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee to invite the US Ambassador James Kenny to appear before it in order to discuss the use of Irish airspace by CIA chartered aircraft.
Bernard Allen, Fine Gael
Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed by RTE, indicates there may have been 38 landings of CIA flights at Shannon Airport, mostly since 2002.
Amnesty International has gone further and claimed that six CIA-chartered aircraft have landed 50 times at Shannon and made 800 flights into western European airspace.
"It would be intolerable if it were shown that Irish facilities were used to covertly transfer prisoners to countries where they could be subjected to illegal forms of interrogation, torture or ill-treatment," Mr Allen said today.
"As a fundamental principle, the Irish Government should make absolutely clear that the use of any Irish facility for the transfer of prisoners, from any country, to any country, and undertaken by any country, must be in accordance with Irish and European law.
"We also have a broader reasonability to ensure that the EU is not supporting any system of secret detention or network of secret prisons. The Guantanamo Bay model of detention, which is unacceptable to us and runs contrary to our principles of justice, must not be imported."
The Green Party today called on the Government to immediately implement a policy of inspecting CIA-chartered planes landing at Irish airports.
Green Party chairman and the party's spokespman on foreign affairs and defence John Gormley said the Government is obliged under two European Conventions to verify that Ireland is not being used as a "transit point for conveying people to face interrogation methods in breach of the EU conventions."
Mr Gormley said it was "of particular interest" that US Federal Aviation Administration records indicate that flight records for CIA-chartered planes from September 2001 to September 2005 reveal that fifty such flights landed at Shannon but only thirty-five took off.
"Amnesty states that these figures suggest 'that some flights were kept secret'. Secret from whom? What do Irish flights records show, or not show?"
