Article · Conspiracies
A secret CIA prison in Lithuania: what the Strasbourg court established, and what it did not
Yes. On 31 May 2018 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a secret CIA detention facility, codenamed "Detention Site Violet" in the US Senate report, operated in Lithuania from 17 or 18 February 2005 to 25 March 2006, and that Abu Zubaydah was held there. In 2009 Lithuania's embassy in Washington denied any such prison, and the government told the court there was no evidence. The court also wrote that there was no evidence of enhanced interrogation techniques being used on the applicant in Lithuania itself.
This piece is not about everything the CIA did around the world. It is about one narrow claim: that the CIA ran a secret prison for terrorism suspects on Lithuanian territory, near Vilnius. In 2009 it was a claim by journalists' sources, denied by Lithuanian institutions. In 2018 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) confirmed it in a judgment, and in July 2026 it was repeated in another case.