Archive for category News & Clippings
Human rights and torture news roundup
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 23/05/2012
Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is in Zimbabwe for a week to investigate human rights abuses (Photo by: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre, available via Flickr through Creative Commons License)
Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – essentially the world’s top human rights chief – is currently visiting Zimbabwe this week. On her first investigatory mission, Ms Pillay will spend one week in the Southern African country to follow-up on decades of allegations of severe and gross human rights violations, including torture and political violence during the 2008 elections. The government, of course, is denying that torture is practiced in Zimbabwe, despite testimonies to the contrary. Zimbabwe will again have elections this year – 2012.
Speaking of the United Nations, the UN’s Committee against Torture is winding down their semi-annual review of countries. This round included, among others, Canada, Cuba, and Albania. The Committee also requested Syria submit a report following a year-long clashes with protester and thousands of accusations of human rights violations and torture. Syria refused to come.
Finally, last week Al Jazeera reported that we – the IRCT – had sponsored a forensics expert to perform a second autopsy on a young man in Bahrain after his parents requested assistance and suspected possible torture. The Bahrain Public Prosecutor agreed to look further into the case, but we have officially called on him, Nayef Yousif, to not ignore the evidence presented in the autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Dr Sebnem Korur, a leading international expert, winner of the first International Medical Peace Award and an instrumental contributor to the Istanbul Protocol.
Hunger strikes and torture
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 08/05/2012
Many torture victims have historically used the protest method of hunger striking to fight for change
As of this blog’s posting, Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja has been on hunger strike for 90 days in protest of his detention and treatment in Bahrain. The use of hunger strikes has a long history for the politically powerless to advocate for change. Photo available through Creative Commons license.
Currently, in Bahrain Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja remains on hunger strike – day 90, according to the organisation that he founded, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights.
Guarded by the Bahrain Defence Force, Al-Khawaja has not consumed food in about three months in protest of his ongoing mistreatment – both torture at the hands of military and police officials, and judicial mistreatment by the military court that found him guilty and delivered a life sentence for his involvement in last year’s protests. He further accused authorities of force feeding him during recent weeks, an accusation that they, of course, deny.
Hunger strikes have a long history among political dissidents, detainees, and, the politically powerless to advocate or coerce authorities into policy changes. It can be both a powerful tool for enacting change, and, by its nature, can also be extremely dangerous and even deadly for its participants. Some famous examples of hunger strikers include:
• Mohandas Gandhi during the British rule of India;
• Women on both sides of the Atlantic protesting for equal suffrage during the early 20th century;
• Irish republicans in particular have a long history of hunger striking; but this tactic was famously used during the early 1980s by Bobby Sands and other prisoners of the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Ten hunger strikers died in 1981;
• Among the longest and most deadly strikes were those that took place in Turkey, with the final wave beginning in 2000, over the government’s prison policy – the state was building new prisons that the protesters feared would be used for long-term solitary confinement for political dissidents, regardless of whether they had even been formally charged with a crime.
• At Guantanamo Bay, hunger strikes have been ongoing since 2005, when more than 120 detainees were on hunger strike at one point. Since then, this number has varied as the U.S. government has continued to force feed the strikers. It is unknown how many detainees remain on hunger strike today.
As hunger striking is often a tactic of absolute last resort, many torture victims have employed hunger strikes to protest their treatment and perhaps ongoing torture and detention.
Al-Khawaja is one such example; during his detention, which began in April of last year, he has been severely tortured by Bahrain authorities. In fact, his previous visit to the Bahrain military hospital where he is today was after such a severe beating in prison that he underwent surgery to have titanium plates inserted into the sides of his head.
Other U.S. prisoners, in California’s Pelican Bay Prison, have also engaged in limited hunger strikes in protest of long-term solitary confinement. They have since requested a formal ruling from the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Juan Mendez, who has previously deemed long-term solitary confinement as torture.
Detainees at Guantamao Bay have too used hunger striking to protest their treatment and ongoing detention. However, rather than trying or freeing the Guantanamo detainees, or ceasing the ongoing torture and ill-treatment there, the U.S. government has instead been force-feeding hunger strikers since 2005 – both a violation of patients’ autonomy and another form or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
Force-feeding hunger strikers is often a highly controversial issue, none the least because it questions medical ethics and physicians adherence to set principles, such as ‘do no harm’, and requirements of patient consent. The World Medical Association has come out against force-feeding as it violates medical ethics, such as respecting patient autonomy, primary obligations to patients over employers, preventing maltreatment, and preventing harm. This is especially true in cases, such as in Guantanamo, where authorities are force-feeding hunger strikers well before the fast becomes life-threatening. Furthermore, the process of force-feeding itself – often inserting feeding tubes down an uncooperative patients’ nose or throat – can cause immense pain and suffering.
Most important to consider is that the vast majority of hunger strikers do not want to die. Death is not the goal, and a hunger strike is generally not considered suicide. It is a measure of last resort for an often powerless figure fighting for policy change, to end torture and mistreatment or for release from degrading and arbitrary detention.
Why the US must release the torture report
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings, North America on 02/05/2012
The world needs to know CIA torture was pointless, thus public release is imperative
Current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — former CIA Director during the mission that led to Osama bin Laden's death — denies that torture produced the information leading to bin Laden's whereabouts. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, available through Flickr Fresh Conservative, Creative Commons License.
The four-year long investigation on CIA’s detention and torture practices after 9/11 by the US Senate Intelligence Committee is close to an end.
Many of the same old questions are resurfacing, bringing the debate of torture effectiveness to the fore yet again.
Did the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by CIA produce counter-terrorism breakthroughs or no more than wrong leads? Could information have been obtained in other ways?
According to Reuters, “the backers of such techniques, […] maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.”
Most of the speculation around this question though, seems to be confirming that the Bush administration made an enormous mistake by choosing to ignore the immense body of knowledge disproving the effectiveness of torture.
To make it clear, the report needs to be made public. Activists and human rights organisations, including the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, are therefore pressing for its release.
An ugly truth
Posted by IRCT in Europe, From our members, News & Clippings on 30/04/2012
The jobs we do not see advertised in the papers
”If this sounds like a sick joke, that’s only because jobs like this aren’t usually advertised. But the jobs exist and there’s no shortage of candidates.”
This is the point made by Freedom from Torture, a UK-based rehabilitation organisation and IRCT member, through an original campaign being run in major British newspapers.
An unusual job offer, but a usual reality
The organisation came up with several fictional job ads, where, for example, “a government department is looking for a torturer to work in a well equipped prison”, or “a militia group is recruiting a senior human rights abuser.”
Among several other oddities, candidates applying for the “torturer job” are expected to be ready to inflict extreme pain and suffering.
This ad and other similar ones created by Freedom from Torture are surely taking job-seekers by surprise. However, the reality portrayed by the campaign may also be a surprise to the general public. The reality is, torture – and torturers – exist and is a common practice around the world. Lack of awareness about it impedes the work done by the torture rehabilitation organisations, members of the IRCT network, like Freedom from Torture.
As Freedom from Torture puts it, we need your help. You can contribute to efforts to alleviate the devastating long-lasting effects of torture and join us in speaking out against this inhumane practice and supporting the work of the IRCT and its members.
25 de Abril Always
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 25/04/2012
On the anniversary of the end of Portuguese dictatorship, the testimonies of torture survivors may remind us to learn from the past — that torture is never justified.
"25th of April ALWAYS!" Available through Creative Commons license
Today, 38 years ago, a military coup ended almost 50 years years of dictatorial regime in Portugal. With it came the end of the Portuguese colonial war and the oldest European colonial empire. This was the carnation revolution in 1974.
During the dictatorship, particularly during the long-lasting regime of Salazar (1936-1972), Portugal saw an unprecedented curtailment of civil rights and liberties. Wide-reaching censorship succeeded to halt all initiatives against the government.
PIDE, the political police, became the regime’s most emblematic means of control. With its wide network of informants in schools, workplaces and recreational areas, PIDE corrupted Portuguese society from within and consolidated the power of Salazar, using, whenever necessary, physical and psychological torture to obtain confessions and accusations.
Fortunately, freedom came so quickly after the 1974 revolution, that most of the crimes committed by the regime have been told and retold with remarkable detail in numerous books, essays and news articles.
While it is not surprising that what I’ve just told resembles other revolutionary episodes of the same historical period, it is indeed quite striking that some of the torture testimonies of the period look a lot like recent international media stories on torture. We haven’t learned our lesson.
Already in 1932, for example, Salazar was using the “ticking time-bomb” [PDF] scenario to justify torture. At one occasion, he asked a journalist [PDF] whether “the lives of children and defenceless people are not worth, and justify, a dozen timely shakes on those sinister creatures…”.
Another, from 1974, shortly after the revolution, was told by the psychiatrist who evaluated many of the victims. He said that, “for the police, making the prisoners talk wasn’t the most important. What they were truly interested in was to destroy the prisoners personality and to create a climate of terror in the whole country through the stories told by the relatives of those subjected to torture”.
Today, while Portugal commemorates, we take the opportunity to honour the victims of torture and human rights defenders, many of whom were instrumental in bringing down the regime, thus changing the course of history. Their bravery should be honoured in learning from history; not repeating the justifications for and horrific practices of torture for those who seek governments that respect human rights.
For more information:
Some of the torture victims of Salazar’s regime were masterly portrayed in Susana de Sousa Dias’ prize-winning 2009 documentary film “48”. We recommend watching it [PDF]. Here is a clip:
Fábio works at the IRCT as a Communications Officer and Editorial Assistant for TORTURE Journal.
Torture in black and white: books on torture
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 17/04/2012
Recently, on our organisation’s website, we wrote about a new book from former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Manfred Nowak. The book, titled Torture: the banality of the unfathomable (in German: Folter: Die Alltäglichkeit des Unfassbaren) chronicles Professor Nowak’s experiences in documenting torture around the world, both during his professional career and during his mandate for the UN, where he traveled to almost 20 countries in all regions of the world.
However, Nowak’s book is only in his native German; but it started us thinking about other books – both fiction and non-fiction – that address torture and its impact on the victims and their families. Similarly to our previous list on the top films, we present here our top books on torture. If there are any we have left off or neglected, please remind us in the comments.
To start, it’s fitting to point to the current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Juan Mendez, and his recent book Taking A Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights. Mendez, who is himself a torture victim from the Argentine Dirty War, describes it as; “a way to illustrate and enable people to understand how far we’ve come to make the international human rights groups diverse in their composition”. The book provides a very moving and in-depth telling of his own experiences as a torture victim in Latin America in the late 70s, and how since, he has dedicated his life to furthering the cause of human rights.
Many staff here at the IRCT recommended Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Mayer examines the legal justification and excuses for the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ AKA torture, on terrorism suspects by the CIA. As a long-time foreign correspondent, war reporter, and now at the New Yorker, Mayer’s journalistic background and method in writing creates a well-researched and gripping account.
Professor Juan Mendez actually recommended this historically-derived drama in an interview when his own book was published. Set in Chile, Dorfman chronicles a country seeking justice and peace after the violent Pinochet regime. Set several years after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, Death and the Maiden follows the perspective of a women who hears the voice of the man who raped and tortured her several years prior – a man who is now a guest in her kitchen. Beautifully written, Dorfman’s play points to the long-term impact of torture.
While this may come as a surprise for some, George Orwell’s classic novel about a totalitarian state depicts well one of the tools of repression, fear, and control that occurs in such regimes. Although better known for its creation of terms such as ‘Orwellian’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘though police’, the final chapters focus on the torture and interrogation of protagonist Winston Smith. Smith seeks love and individuality in this dystopian novel, only to find it snuffed out by apparatuses of the state.
The third book in our list written by a current or former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law is a seminal work on torture, human rights, and international law by Sir Nigel Rodley. Places of detention, such as prisons, immigration detention centres, police lock-ups, or psychiatric centres, are the most common space in which one would find torture in any given country. As such, Rodley’s book and descriptive analysis is a fundamental read for those interested in how international human rights law came to be applied to a wider manner of human rights concerns, such as the inhumane or ill-treatment of detainees.
Horacio Verbitsky, author of Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, is among the most well-known investigative journalist and human rights advocate in his native Argentina. After the ‘Dirty War’, the decades of human rights violations, extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture in Argentina, the former perpetrators of these crimes – largely the military branches under the regime – kept silent. Impunity prevailed. Verbitsky’s book is a first-hand account of the confessions of retired navy officer Adolfo Scilingo, the first man to break the military’s pact of silence and come forth with the crimes.
Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?: A Human Rights Perspective is a series of essays and analysis from some of the top human rights thinkers, experts, and anti-torture activists in the world on a range of timely, current issues in human rights and the discourse around torture, particularly in the era of the so-called ‘war on terror’. For example, Minky Worden, Media Director of Human Rights Watch, conducts a survey of countries that torture. Eitan Felner, formerly of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and B’Tselem, writes on the Israeli experience. Twelve essays comprise the book.
There were a lot of memos that comprise the almost bureaucratic and systematic manner in which the U.S. government most recently approved the use of torture in interrogation. Among the most famous of these memos was a series of notes from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. After 18 pages of interrogation techniques that defied well-established law on torture, Rumsfeld approved, thus leading to such atrocities as Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay Prison and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
Are there any we have missed? Please let us know in the comments.
“They become shells of their former selves”: Long-term solitary confinement is torture
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 04/04/2012
Walking across the cell would probably take no more than three paces. There is no light. There are no other people. And a prisoner will be there for 23 of 24 hours a day.
A BBC article today recalls the solitary confinement experience of one member of the infamous Angola 3 – three prisoners of one of America’s most brutal prisons who have long claimed their innocence and been the subject of a growing call to address justice issues in the U.S. The three men have spent a combined 100 years in solitary confinement, in cells no larger than three by two meters.
And that is not uncommon in the country with the most people in prison (the U.S. has, by far, the highest incarceration rates in the world – twice as many Americans are imprisoned as in China, where there are five times as many people). Although determining figures are hard to come by, some estimate there are anywhere between 25,000 to 80,000 people locked up in long-term solitary confinement.
“Lock yourself in your bathroom for 10 years, then come out and tell me that that’s not torture”, said one former inmate.
And the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, agrees. Just last year in his first report as the special investigator, Professor Mendez reported that, “Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole, Secure Housing Unit (SHU)… whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by States as a punishment or extortion technique”. Any terms of confinement where an individual is alone for more than 22 hours per day, for a total of more than 15 days, may constitute torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.
Sarah Shourd would agree. The American woman became famous a few years ago when she, her fiancé, and their friend were apprehended by Iranian security forces during a hiking trip on the border with Kurdistan. She spent 9,495 hours in solitary confinement. She recently wrote about this experience:
After two months with next to no human contact, my mind began to slip. Some days, I heard phantom footsteps coming down the hall. I spent large portions of my days crouched down on all fours by a small slit in the door, listening. In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there. More than once, I beat at the walls until my knuckles bled and cried myself into a state of exhaustion. At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realized the screams were my own.
As we find ourselves often having to reiterate, no person shall be subject to torture, and, as Professor Mendez has stated, that includes long-term solitary confinement.
Penalties and Punishments of Yesteryear?
Posted by IRCT in Europe, News & Clippings on 29/03/2012
A pillory: 500€
Next Tuesday, 3 April, if you happen to pass by 11, rue Berryer, in Paris, you might be confronted with a display of torture instruments, for sale!
The auction house Cornette de Saint Cyr will be presenting, among the more than 300 objects and documents, a few sets of handcuffs, a hand crusher, and hanging ropes.
The collection belonged to Fernand Meyssonnier, France’s last executioner, who carried out nearly 200 executions in French-ruled Algeria.
Several human rights organisations already expressed their disagreement with the sale, denouncing the “commercialisation of torture”, and called on the French state to put a halt to the sale, if necessary by buying the lot for national museums.
What those behind the auction house may not know is that torture is at the moment a widespread practice in the majority of the countries. If they had known this they probably wouldn’t have accepted to carry out the sale, and they certainly wouldn’t have called the event “Penalties and Punishments of Yesteryear”.
Fabio is a Communications Officer and Assistant Editor of Torture Journal at IRCT.
Torture in Brazil: what changed in a decade?
Posted by IRCT in Latin America & the Caribbean, News & Clippings on 27/03/2012
The UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT) recently visited several Brazilian penitentiary and police institutions, as well as detention facilities for children and juveniles in the states of Espírito Santo, Goiás, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Four months after the visit, its confidential preliminary observations were presented to the Brazilian government.
At the time of the visit, President Dilma Rousseff, a torture survivor herself, was being pressed to get on with a national mechanism to fight torture. This mechanism is based on the recommendations by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Sir Nigel Rodley, following his visit to Brazil in 2000. His report pointed out the need to end the Brazilian cultural tolerance to torture and highlighted the poor treatment of prisoners in “massively overcrowded” police jails.
Nearly a decade on, the 2009 UNCAT report again raised concern about the systematic practice of torture in Brazil along with “endemic overcrowding, filthy conditions of confinement, extreme heat, light deprivation and permanent lock-ups”. Earlier reports also highlighted the inefficiency of police investigations and to the extreme impunity that prevails in the country, to which judges contributed by ignoring the law defining crimes of torture. According to Conectas, a human rights organisation, the Brazilian government admits a serious problem of torture in the country and admits its own fault in failing to produce systematic data on this abuse.
Many things have changed in Brazil in the past decade. Most notably the consolidation of its status as a global economic power and the outstanding poverty reduction that came with it. While in 2003, 36% of Brazil’s population lived below the national poverty line, that rate fell to 21% in 2009. Torture is, in fact, a cause and effect of poverty. Does this mean we can hope for positive signals in the SPT report? We shall see. That is, if Brazil decides to make the SPT recommendations public.
In the spirit of transparency, which should be a cornerstone of any detention system, we call on the Brazilian government to do so.
Fabio is a Communications Officer and Assistant Editor of Torture Journal at IRCT.
‘Torture’ advert mocks survivors’ experiences
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 22/03/2012
I’m much too late in seeing this ad, but recently, a World Without Torture supporter e-mailed us a link to an atrocious advert from Woolite, a laundry detergent company.
‘Don’t let detergents torture your clothes’ says Woolite, a subsidiary of Reckitt Benckiser, in an advertisement that mocks the experiences of torture and takes the misuse of this term to a tragic low.
This statement follows several scenes of a masked man, trudging through muddy paths, pulling a jumper on a Medieval style stretcher, and dipping other clothes into boiling water. You can watch the full 30-second commercial below.
Directed by famed musician, director, and horror film enthusiast Rob Zombie, the commercial is at best, gimmicky and tacky, and at worst, reveals a disturbing lack of awareness of the reality of torture. Despite using motifs and torture methods associated with the middle ages, the reality is that torture is still used today – more than 90% of countries around the world use torture, estimates international torture experts.
Most significantly, it’s likely that a torture survivor would actually see this ad. Up to a third of asylum seekers to European and North American countries – such as the U.S. where this commercial was targeted – have been tortured. Re-traumatisation of the torture victim, who happens upon this ad during a seemingly banal evening of TV viewing, is among the possibilities of such callous usages of the term ‘torture.’
Regardless, while the misuse of the term torture (as we previously wrote about) is degrading the reality of torture victims experiences, this ad takes this many steps too far. The Woolite ad makes it seem as if torture only occurred during the middle ages, a part of uncivilized history, rather than a current problem; and then cruelly demonstrating torture to sell… laundry detergent. Woolite should be ashamed.
Have you seen any other videos, advertisements or commercials like this, that use the torture experience to sell things? If so, please send them to us.
Tessa works in the IRCT’s Communication Team.
