Germany Drops War Crimes Case Against Rumsfeld

German federal prosecutors last Friday rejected a lawsuit calling for an investigation into alleged war crimes by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking U.S. officials. The request for prosecution, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and Berlin lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, centers on allegations that Rumsfeld personally ordered and condoned torture at U.S. detention facilities, including Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison.

The complaint against Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA Director George Tenet, and other senior civilian and military officials was filed in Germany in mid-November on behalf of 11 Iraqis who had been detained at Abu Ghraib and Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi detained at Guantánamo.

Rumsfeld has said the abuse at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few low-level soldiers and the prisoners affected were mostly not the subject of interrogations, but just “common criminals” who were also detained.

But the plaintiffs claim that the torture at the detention centers in Iraq and Guantánamo was not isolated or the product of a few soldiers gone bad, but rather was widespread and systemic, carried out under orders from the top levels of the military and the Defense Department.

Stymied in their call for high-level accountability in the United States, the plaintiffs thought their best shot was to bring a case in a country, like Germany, that has a strong universal-jurisdiction law, says Michael Ratner, CCR’s president. (A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Rumsfeld on similar grounds was dismissed by Chief Judge Hogan in March. See the Legal Times story here and here.)

German law recognizes the principle of universal jurisdiction, whereby some crimes--such as torture, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity--are considered so heinous they can be prosecuted anywhere, regardless of where they took place or the residence or nationality of the victims or perpetrators. But German law also allows prosecutors to decline to take such cases under certain circumstances, which is what Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms did last Friday.

Kaleck says they now plan to file the lawsuit in Spain, another country with a strong universal-jurisdiction law. (For more background on the case, see this Legal Times story.)