A federal court on Tuesday ordered a private company, a subcontractor of the American army, to pay 42 million dollars (37 million francs) to three former detainees of Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison infamous for having been the scene of torture and humiliation.
The private American company CACI International, to which the army had delegated the interrogations of the detainees, was found by a jury in the American state of Virginia responsible for the “torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” suffered by the three Iraqis. , according to the decision.
She was consequently ordered to compensate each person to the tune of $14 million. The plaintiffs are a school principal, a fruit seller and a journalist – currently living in Sweden – arrested following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and detained at Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, Baghdad.
“Today is a great day for me and for justice,” responded the latter, quoted in a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represented the three plaintiffs. “I have waited a long time to see this day. “It’s not just the victory of the three plaintiffs in this case against one company,” he added.
“Our clients have courageously fought for sixteen years to obtain redress for the horrors they suffered at Abu Ghraib, against all the obstacles that this enormous private military contractor put in their way,” said the director. lawyer of the CCR, Baher Azmy, cited in the text.
In 2014, after years of litigation and the court-martial sentencing of eleven soldiers to prison terms, a federal appeals court authorized legal proceedings against CACI International.
The plaintiffs invoked the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a 1789 federal law that allows aliens who are victims of violations of international law to be heard in U.S. courts.
They claimed that, in their cases, the soldiers were de facto under the orders of the private interrogators. On the contrary, the company argued that the American army exercised total control over these interrogations, in particular the techniques used.
Civilian CACI employees were accused of encouraging the military to mistreat prisoners to prepare them for interrogations.
The dissemination, in 2004, of photos showing Abu Ghraib detainees humiliated and mistreated by American soldiers sparked global indignation, further weakening the position of the George W. Bush administration, already widely criticized for its decision to ‘invade Iraq.
