El-Masri v. Macedonia

Khaled El-Masri (plaintiff) was a German national and suspected terrorist. The United States had understandings with different countries in which suspected terrorists would be delivered to U.S. agents. On December 31, 2003, as El-Masri was headed to Skopje in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Macedonia) (defendant) for vacation, he was stopped at the Serbia-Macedonia border due to the newness of his German passport. El-Masri was detained and interrogated at the border checkpoint and then taken to a hotel where he was watched by a team of nine men. El-Masri was placed under constant surveillance, threatened at gunpoint, and offered a deal in which he would be released if he confessed to being a member of al-Qaeda. On day 13 of his detention, El-Masri began a hunger strike. On January 23, 2004, Macedonian security forces handcuffed and blindfolded El-Masri and took him to the Skopje Airport, under the guise of returning him to Germany. In fact, El-Masri was being turned over to a team of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers. At the airport, El-Masri was beaten, violently unclothed, sodomized by an object, and tranquilized by a group of disguised men. The aircraft was guarded by Macedonian security guards. Thereafter, El-Masri was transported to a CIA-run facility in Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dark concrete cell for several months and interrogated by CIA officers. El-Masri went on two hunger strikes to protest his detention, and his health deteriorated. El-Masri’s captors forcibly fed him using a feeding tube. Eventually, in late May 2004, El-Masri was returned to Germany, 40 pounds lighter than he had been and in a completely unkempt state. El-Masri initiated a case against Macedonia, alleging violations of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the convention), to which Macedonia was bound.