[JURIST] Amnesty International [advocacy website] marked International Day in Support of Victims of Torture [UN backgrounder] by protesting [press release] in front of the European Parliament [official website] in Brussels on Thursday. The protest criticized European Union states for failing to condemn alleged abuses in countries like the United States and Tunisia, warning that many governments were using the threat of terrorism as a justification for repression and torture. The group called on EU governments to publicly condemn torture and hold its practitioners accountable. Al Jazeera has more.

Earlier this month, Amnesty accused [report text; JURIST report] Tunisia of committing wide-spread human rights abuses under overly-broad anti-terrorism legislation [Amnesty backgrounder]. In January, Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier [official profile] said that the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade would remove the US from an internal document that lists countries that employ interrogation methods that amount to torture [JURIST reports] and where prisoners risk being tortured.