14 EL HASKI v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT “... The mistreatment and unfair trials of suspected militants who were rounded up after the suicide bombings of May 16, 2003, recalled in some ways the grave violations of the past ... ... while some of the suspects arrested in 2003 went missing in police custody for up to several months, they were all accounted for eventually. However, many were subjected to torture or mistreatment while under interrogation. Some were held in an unacknowledged detention center in Temara, a facility under the auspices of the National Surveillance Directorate (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, DST). Some 900 of the suspects were sentenced to prison terms, many in hasty proceedings that did not provide defendants their basic due process rights. Seventeen were sentenced to death, sentences that have not been carried out yet. ... Authorities have responded to reports of present-day abuses by characterizing them as isolated phenemona. [footnote: For example, [the] Justice Minister ... said abuses in the context of the round-up of terror suspects were ‘rare’ and ‘isolated,’ but vowed, ‘We will respond to reports of violations.’ ...] Mohamed VI, in an interview published in the Spanish daily El País on January 16, 2005, acknowledged the existence of ‘twenty cases of abuse’ that he said were being handled by the courts. No details of these twenty cases have been disclosed, to Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, making it difficult to verify whether and for what offenses officials were being held accountable. Overall, the pattern of continuing abuses, criticized by various human rights organizations as well as by the U.N. Human Rights Committee, [footnote: See the Concluding Observations of the Human Rights Committee on Morocco, November 5, 2004, CCPR/CO/82/MAR] shows that security forces continue to operate in a climate of impunity and disrespect for the law, and that the executive branch continues to exercise considerable influence over the courts. ...” 54. In the above-mentioned report, published in February 2004 and entitled “mission internationale d’enquête – les autorités marocaines à l’épreuve du terrorisme : la tentation de l’arbitraire – violations flagrantes des droits de l’Homme dans la lutte anti-terroriste” (international factfinding mission – the Moroccan authorities’ response to terrorism: the temptation to act arbitrarily – flagrant human rights violations in the counter-terrorism context”, the International Human Rights Federation (FIDH) analysed the human rights situation in Morocco in the context of the crackdown on terrorism after the bombings of 16 May 2003. It reported that there had been thousands of arrests, many of which were illegal, followed by numerous cases of arbitrary deprivations of liberty in secret centres. Chapter 2-4, entitled “torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”, reads as follows [translation by the Registry]: “In such centres, interrogations are carried out in breach of the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, adopted by the United Nations in 1975, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984, ratified by Morocco. At the Témara centre, where most prisoners are taken after their arrest, ill-treatment, violence and torture is, by all accounts, common practice. The cells, situated in the basement, are lit day and night. When they move around, as well as during