A/HRC/13/42* page 56 be ‘effective’ in practice as well as in law, in particular in the sense that its exercise must not be unjustifiably hindered by the acts or the omissions of the authorities”.209 Furthermore, according to the European Court, authorities must always make a serious attempt to find out what happened210 and “should not rely on hasty or ill-founded conclusions to close their investigation or as the basis of their decisions”.211 124. According to two high-ranking Government officials at the time, revelations about the existence of detention facilities in Eastern Europe in late 2005 by the Washington Post and ABC news led the CIA to close its facilities in Lithuania and Romania and move the Al-Qaida detainees out of Europe. It is not known where these persons were transferred; they could have been moved into “war zone facilities” in Iraq and Afghanistan204 or to another black site, potentially in Africa. The experts were not able to find the exact destination of the 16 high-value detainees between December 2005 and their move to Guantanamo in September 2006. No other explanation has been provided for the whereabouts of the detainees before they were moved to Guantanamo in September 2006. 125. Other locations have been mentioned as the venues for secret detention facilities outside territories under United States control (or operated jointly with the United States military). The first is Guantanamo, which was mentioned by the United States officials who spoke to the Washington Post in 2005, when it was reported that the detention facility had existed “on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay”, but that “some time in 2004, the CIA decided it had to give [it] up … The CIA had planned to convert it into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military [but] pulled out when US courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees”.212 More recently, former Guantanamo Bay guards have described “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged” compound located out of sight from the main road between two plateaus, about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter with the access road chained off. The unacknowledged “camp no” is described as having had no guard towers and being surrounded with concertina wire, with one part of the compound having “the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps”. At this point, it is unclear whether this facility was run by the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command. The experts are concerned about the possibility that three Guantanamo 209 See Aksoy v. Turkey, judgement of December 1996, para 95; and Kaya v. Turkey, judgement of 19 February 1998, para 106. 210 See Timurtas v. Turkey, judgement of 13 June 2000, para. 88. 211 Assenov v. Bulgaria, op. cit., para. 104. 212 Dana Priest, “CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons”, Washington Post, 2 November 2005. Available from www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html.