government has requested that the Egyptian government carry out a thorough and independent inquiry, “We have still not received a satisfying response to our request.”71 Indeed, the sending government has no incentive to find that torture or ill-treatment has occurred because by doing so it makes an admission that it has violated its own nonrefoulement obligation. In May 2004, Human Rights Watch obtained a classified report detailing the first post-return monitoring visit by Swedish diplomats to the two Egyptians expelled from Stockholm in December 2001.72 The classified version of the report included allegations by the men that they had been physically abused by Swedish police officers, and had been seriously physically abused and ill-treated by Egyptian security police in the first five weeks of incommunicado detention upon return to Cairo. These allegations had been deleted from the publicly available version of the monitoring report. The Swedish authorities also did not make the classified version with the allegations of abuse available to various United Nations mechanisms examining the men’s cases.73 Moreover, the idea that confidential monitoring alone can exert sufficient pressure to forestall abuses is misguided. The April 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal further reveals the limits of confidential monitoring.74 Although the ICRC had access to the Abu Ghraib prison, military and intelligence personnel deliberately obstructed monitors’ efforts to meet with and evaluate certain detainees. When the ICRC confidentially transmitted its concerns regarding the ill-treatment of some detainees, the United States government virtually ignored those complaints. The challenges of monitoring for torture indicate that even the most expert monitors cannot provide the necessary safeguards against, and accountability for, acts of torture perpetrated in secrecy. The Principle: Diplomatic Assurances Undermine the Nonrefoulement Obligation Reliance upon diplomatic assurances signals an erosion of the absolute obligation not to return or transfer a person to a place where he or she is at risk of torture or ill-treatment. 71 Speech by Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds, “Security under the Rule of Law,” on the occasion of the visit to Stockholm of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, December 1, 2004, copy on file with Human Rights Watch. 72 Copy on file with Human Rights Watch. 73 One of the men’s lawyers subsequently forwarded a copy of the classified report to the U.N. Committee against Torture in August 2004. 74 Human Rights Watch, The Road to Abu Ghraib, June 2004. 27 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOL. 17 NO. 4(D)