The Malaysian government have been urged to stop participating in any extraordinary rendition process and to disclose any collaboration it has with the United State Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other foreign authorities where individuals have been detained, interrogated, tortured and transferred around the world at the command of foreign governments.

Lawyers for Liberty, in a statement today, expressed their concern with Malaysia’s probable involvement in the brutal CIA programme in the years following the attack on September 11 in New York and Washington D.C.

It also explained that extraordinary rendition is the transfer without legal process of a detainee, often “suspected terrorists” to the custody of a foreign government where they are detained in “black sites” for the purposes of CIA detention and interrogation where they will be subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques, which would involve torture and cruelty.

“If this is true, it is a cause for great concern as the Malaysian authorities had arbitrarily and secretly detained foreign nationals who seemingly have not committed any criminal offense in the country.

“The arrest and detention seemed to have been done without any legal basis, due process and had operated outside the realm of the Malaysian Constitution and other legal safeguards including access to legal counsel or hearing by a Magistrate during remand. Instead, the arrest was seemingly done at the direction of the CIA or other foreign authorities,” said its executive director, Eric Paulsen.

This statement was made following a report by Open Society Justice Initiative, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition in 2012 detailed the 2004 rendition of Libyan nationals Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq (Abdul Hakim Belhadj) and his wife, Fatima Bouchar who was pregnant at the time.

It was reported that they were detained for 13 days in Malaysia under bad conditions before being “transferred” to Thailand.