On 14 November, several human rights organizations filed a criminal complaint in a German Court on behalf of eleven Iraqis held at Abu-Ghraib and one Afghan detainee held at Guantánamo Bay. The organizations request the German Federal Prosecutor to open an investigation into former Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking US officials for authorizing torture and ill-treatment of detainees. A similar complaint, filed in 2004 concerning abuses at Abu-Ghraib, was dismissed in 2005 on the ground that the US was neither unwilling nor incapable of investigating the alleged abuses.

![Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike on the village of Taybeh in southern Lebanon [Source: Al Jazeera]](https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-20-at-15.56.24-300x200.png)


