Whichever statute one likes to use, it is a simple fact that your country cannot 'disappear' you.
Well, no, as you point out in the part I snipped, a country
can "disappear" you—even civilized ones. That is, they certainly have the ability to do so. Whether they can lawfully do so depends on the letter of the law as it varies from place to place.
You and I and others are likely to have a substantially similar idea of what enforced disappearance might look like. But if you're going to hold a nation responsible in court, those ideas are irrelevant. Only the letter of the law matters.
However, Sweden whisking the two Egyptian nationals off the street, who were there quite legally, at the command of the CIA and without any court order or warrant may have been 'understandable' in the circumstances but it doesn't hide the fact it was a 'disappearance' as set out in the Rome Treaty 1998 edict.
No. Here is the statute you cite to:
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court said:
"Enforced disappearance of persons" means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.
What are the elements?
(1) arrest, detention, or abduction of persons
(2) by state authority
(3) refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of freedom
(4) refusal to give information about the fate or whereabouts
(5) the intent to deprive the persons of the protection of law
(6) for a prolonged period of time.
Were the Egyptians arrested and detained? Yes. We don't need to contemplate whether they were "abducted."
Was this done by state authority? Yes.
Did Sweden refuse to acknowledge the deprivation of freedom? No. Sweden did not represent in any way than the men had not been detained. Now the question is what constitutes legal acknowledgement. Here it's that the arrest and detention has been properly documented under the ordinary processes of the government, which occurred. That it took some time for certain parties to learn of this does not factor into it.
Did Sweden refuse to give information about the whereabouts or fate of the two men? No, although disclosure was not immediate. The men's families were eventually notified and were permitted to visit the men in Egypt. It took 48 hours for the men's lawyers in Sweden to discover what had happened to them, but this does not rise to a violation. As anxious as everyone may have been, that's considered a reasonable administrative delay. In the U.S. you can be held essentially incommunicado for 48 hours, or 72 hours in some states, as lawful detainment.
Did Sweden intend to deprive the men of the protection of law? Not as the law understands it. True, by detaining and deporting them rather than granting them asylum, Sweden denied them the protection of
Swedish law against abuse. However, Sweden stated their belief that the men would receive the protection of Egyptian law, based on assurances of the government.
Here is where Sweden broke a different law. It has nothing to do with establishing intent. At worst Sweden was shown to have been negligent in their assessment of Egypt's assurance. Negligence is not intent. It's still bad, and Sweden was held correctly accountable for it. But the law doesn't let you translate negligence into intent. This element fails.
Were the men kept incommunicado for a "prolonged period of time?" No. You may quibble over how long "prolonged" is, but the same court that handed down the judgment in the cases of the two Egyptians ruled in a different case that 7 days constitutes prolonged deprivation of legal protection. Access to legal protect for these men (such as it may have been) was restored only a couple of days after their deportation.
People certainly seemed willing to hold Sweden accountable for their behavior. I certainly think Sweden and the U.S. acted reprehensibly in this matter. But why wasn't Sweden charged with enforced disappearance, among the other crimes they were accused of? My answer is that the above shows that while Sweden satisfied some of the elements of the crime, it did not satisfy all of them.
If you want to hold them morally accountable according to your private definition, that's your prerogative. But since you've cited to a statute and said that this is the statute Sweden broke, that's the standard that applies to your argument.
This is relevant because it shows that with regard to the claimed disappearance of several senior crew of the Estonia in 1994 and Carl Bildt working with the US to encourage Estonia the country to join NATO asap shows that Sweden had done it before, if this is what happened.
Yes, this is Bollyn's argument, to which you have firmly fastened yourself. Absent any actual evidence, he's trying some smoke-and-mirrors by saying that if Sweden did it once before, surely they are capable of doing it again. But he has to bend and twist the facts to get them to fit his "pattern."
