A year after the Bush administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods, CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers.

Interrogators kept the unidentified detainee awake by chaining him to the walls and floor of a cell, according to government officials and memos issued with an internal CIA report. The Obama administration released the internal report this week.

The former United Nations war crimes judge, who marks her first year in office next Tuesday, said she has used an "instinctive" blend of quiet diplomacy and public condemnation to highlight violations worldwide.

The U.S. Justice Department named a special prosecutor this week to investigate CIA interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States under then-President George W. Bush.

"Whenever people come under the jurisdiction of the United States, the United States has to be seen to be upholding the very high standards that they claim for their own citizens," Pillay told Reuters in her office overlooking Lake Geneva.

Any torture or death inflicted on suspects held by U.S. authorities in places including Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan should be part of this investigation, she said.

Asked whether it should go beyond establishing the criminal liability of CIA interrogators, Pillay replied: "That is international law on accountability -- that you do not stop at the foot soldiers, you go right up to the ultimate authority that is legally responsible."

"And these would include those who devised the policy, those who ordered it," said Pillay, a Tamil from South Africa.

Montalvo, a US military lawyer, maintained Jawad was between 12 and 15 years old when he was detained. The Pentagon says he was 16 or 17 when arrested in Afghanistan on charges of throwing a grenade at a US convoy.

The lawyer said Afghan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak had pledged to assist Jawad but stressed that does not mean "we will not pursue the US government to assist him in his transition".

Jawad's legal advisors would pursue punitive procedures in the US federal courts but were also pressing for his immediate food and housing expenses to be taken care of, given his lack of education, poor family and widowed mother.
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In a convoluted case, a military judge tossed out most of the evidence against Jawad towards the end of 2008 and a federal prosecutor quit the case, saying the young Afghan's statements had been obtained through torture.