Posts Tagged human rights
Women at the frontline in the fight against torture
Posted by IRCT in Latin America & the Caribbean, Middle East North Africa, Rehabilitation, Voices, Women/Girls/Gender on 08/03/2012
Today, on International Women’s Day (8 March), we wish to join the worldwide movement to honour women as human rights defenders. Women from all over the world, including at our 140+ member centres in over 70 countries, work at the frontline in the fight against torture. These women lobby national governments, head human rights inter-governmental bodies, work in rehabilitating torture survivors, and are often survivors of torture themselves.
At World Without Torture, we would like to honour these women by providing a platform for their stories today. Please share these stories to honour not only their work, but the hundreds of thousand of women human rights defenders worldwide.
What do we do with what others have done to us?
Brazilian psychologist and human rights activist Vera Vital Brasil knows from experience what she is talking about when she tells about her years of work with torture victims.
As a student at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in the late ’60s, Vera participated actively in the student movement, a major focus of resistance to Brazil’s military dictatorship. Because of her activism, in 1969, she was arrested and tortured on the premises of the notorious DOI-CODI, the Destacamento de Operações de Informações – Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna in Rio de Janeiro. After three months in prison, Vera left Rio for exile in Chile. Her exile lasted six years and upon her return to Brazil, she was determined to try to turn the wrongs that others done to her into something good.
“What do we do with what others have done to us? Internalize this tormenting experience or fight to stop this happening again? I chose the latter,” she says about her involvement with victims of torture through clinical work.
In 1982, Vera joined other former political prisoners living in Rio de Janeiro against the appointment of people responsible for torture during the dictatorship. This initiative eventually led a group of former political prisoners, torture survivors and relatives of dead and missing people to found the Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais (GTNM/RJ, which in English stands for Never More Torture Group) in 1985, which, in 1991, started providing medical and psychological treatment and physical rehabilitation to victims of torture.
Throughout these years, her personal experience and dedication to other victims have convinced her that the trauma caused by torture can never be completely overcome but must be addressed through clinical treatment and proper redress.
“The damage caused by torture is accentuated if it is ignored, if there is no justice, or no redress. The fact that the state, which should guarantee and protect human life, is the agent of violence has a devastating effect on people’s psychological well-being. Our clinical practice is insufficient to cure this damage. But we can try to get people who have gone through this harrowing experience to feel better and give another meaning to this suffering, shifting it from a personal and private level to the collective and historical level, “she says.
Read Vera Brasil’s full story here.
Giving a voice to the victims
“You try to channel revenge through peaceful channels, you know, campaigning, publishing, providing legal consultation, providing legal aid, taking the person to court, accompanying the person throughout this process,” says Dr. Aida Seif El Dawla.
Dr. Seif El Dawla, founding member, psychiatrist, and human rights defender at Egyptian centre El Nadeem, was awarded the 2011 Alkarama Award for Human Rights Defenders.
For nearly two decades at the El-Nadeem Centre for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, she has worked with countless victims of torture. When the Egyptian clinic began in 1993, Seif El Dawla and the other founders wanted to provide psychological services to the survivors of torture and their families. They sought other like-minded organisations – medically-based NGOs that served the psycho-social needs of victims of violence – to model their new clinic. Soon they realised that focusing simply on the psychological rehabilitation neglected the social and political aspects that allowed the crimes to continue – the victims’ access to justice and seeking the prevention of torture.
“Many of the people who come don’t really want to have a psychological assessment,” she says. “I realised that those people aren’t really patients in the classic sense of patients. They have responded very normally to an extremely abnormal situation.”
El-Nadim not only had to treat the psychological consequences of torture, but provide their clients with access to medical doctors to treat the physical wounds. In addition, many survivors came to the clinic with a need to channel their anger, humiliation, and helplessness into bringing their perpetrators to justice, bringing the crimes to light.
When the image of Khaled Said’s face appeared in the newspapers, bruised and beaten, Seif El Dawla had seen it all before. Said’s image ignited change. The people of Egypt have become fed up with a broken system and a police force that tortures, carries out arbitrary arrests, and falsifies forensic reports, she says.
“Already before the 25th of January people had enough of this kind of violence. They had enough. And it’s not a coincidence that the first targets of the people when they revolted were the police stations, all over, because there isn’t a governor, there isn’t a city, where there isn’t a family who has lost somebody to a police station or who has a relative who was abused or humiliated in a police station. So, it was already boiling. Now, people are not willing to take it anymore.”
Read Dr. Seif El Dawla’s full story here. And, see the short film on the Khaled Said case, which features her in an interview.
A voice for the torture victims in Ecuador
During her medicine studies in the late eighties, Yadira Narvaez was unexpectedly transferred from a neurological clinic, where she worked as an intern, to the medical department of a male prison.
The unwanted transfer was a punishment for her habit of wearing trousers. “My superior said that if what I wanted was to look like a male, I should be as close as possible to men”, she remembers. The experience became one of the most transformative events in Forensic Doctor Yadira Narvaez’s life. “It was a striking experience: there I learned the difference between being alive and dead”.
While working at the medical department of that prison, where approximately 1,500 men served their sentences, she discovered the real meaning of the word torture. “By then, I really didn’t know what torture meant and what it could do to people”. Dr Narvaez‘s placement at the prison ended after 18 months but has led to decades of dedication to the treatment and protection of torture survivors and prisoners.
Two years after the end of the “punishment”, Dr Narvaez decided to go back to work in the same prison, this time, of her own free will. She went on to also work in the treatment of female detainees at another penal institution. Being a witness of the suffering caused by a lack of respect for human rights made Dr Narvaez realise that she needed to do something to try to protect prisoners and to assist torture survivors.
To address the problem on a national level, Dr Narvaez helped found the Foundation for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence (in short PRIVA) in 1997. In addition to denouncing torture in Ecuador, PRIVA focuses on the prevention and eradication of torture and the care of torture victims and their families.
“Like Martin Luther King, I also have a dream: that one day in my country all individuals who, for any reason come into contact with the penal system have their rights respected, have the right to be heard and the right to justice,” says the 52-year old doctor. “And torture victims need access to rehabilitation services to recover at least part of the health lost due to arbitrary practices by state agents. In addition, torture survivors need to be assured that these violations will not continue so that they can go on to live without fear”.
Read Dr. Narvaez’s full story here.
Taking the Istanbul Protocol forward
Posted by IRCT in Forensics - Project Work on 06/03/2012
Creating national plans for documenting torture – and UN monitoring of it – is hopefully the next stage for IRCT’s work with the Istanbul Protocol
A main impediment for torture victims to access justice is their lack of access to have physical and mental trauma documented by qualified medical experts. Without such evidence, cases are often dismissed without trial and the victims branded as lacking credibility.
Simply, for torture victims to take a case forward and for perpetrators to be held accountable, victims need access to documentation of their trauma provided by qualified experts.
For more than 10 years, the IRCT and key partner organisations have been working on ensuring effective access for all torture victims to a competent, independent and impartial medical/psychological examination of their trauma. This has mainly been done through promotion of the Istanbul Protocol, the UN-recognised standard and guide on documenting torture.
For example, through the IRCT’s collaboration with key forensic scientists, we have been able to use the Istanbul Protocol in key torture cases, such as with Khaled Said in Egypt.
One aspect of this work is to ensure that international and regional human rights mechanisms promote Istanbul Protocol implementation when they discuss human rights implementation with States. Last week in Geneva, two important events revitalised our belief that this ambitious objective can actually be achieved.
On Friday, Human Rights Foundation Turkey, Physicians for Human Rights, REDRESS and the IRCT co-hosted a meeting with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and several of her staff to kick off the drafting of an action plan for national implementation of the Istanbul Protocol.
This plan, which will be developed in consultation with experts from across the globe, will set the framework for future activities aimed at building national systems for documenting torture. The plan, based on 10 years of experience and learning by the stakeholders, will tackle such issues as legal reform, raising awareness of professionals – such as immigrations officials and judges – that come in contact with torture victims, and monitoring and quality control. This will set the policy framework for much more concerted efforts on Istanbul Protocol implementation in the years to come. In this regard it was particularly encouraging to hear the strong support from the high commissioner herself, Navi Pillay, who has taken a very implementation-focused approach to her mandate.
With a strong implementation framework in the pipeline, the IRCT has worked actively to ensure that UN human rights monitoring mechanisms make strong and targeted recommendations on torture documentation to States.
The latest of these activities took place the day before the meeting with the High Commissioner. Here, two colleagues and I participated in a discussion with the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture on how strengthen its torture documentation recommendations to States. The dialogue was based on a discussion paper developed by the IRCT where we set out a wide range of concrete initiatives that can be recommended to States wishing to improve torture victims’ access to documentation. The intention was to initiate a process of reflection among the SPT members on how they can advance their work in these areas. It was therefore very encouraging to see the level of engagement from many SPT members and the subsequent decision for the SPT medical group to further consider the discussion paper.
Having worked for five years on Istanbul Protocol implementation, it is very encouraging to see these developments taking place at a fairly rapid pace, and it generates renewed energy to move forward with the next initiatives. This will include a combination of international policy initiatives and concrete analysis of access to torture documentation in individual countries.
By Asger, IRCT’s Legal Officer and Geneva representative
New treaty would empower child survivors of torture
School children rally against torture in Sierra Leone with IRCT member Community Association for Psychosocial Services (CAPS). The new treaty creates a mechanism for children to bring their complaints of human rights violations, such as torture, before an international body.
Tuesday, the new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child opened for signature. The treaty will create an international complaints mechanism for children who have experienced human rights violations – the last of the core human rights instruments to gain a complaints procedure.
Importantly, the first 10 states to ratify it will be decisive actors in bringing the mechanism alive, since it will enter into force upon the 10th ratification. This post is an encouragement and tribute to the States that will take the lead in implementing this crucial measure for the enhancement of children’s rights worldwide.
When entered into force, children or their representatives will be able to bring complaints of human rights violations before a committee of international experts, when and if domestic courts fail to remedy violations. This is a major step towards strengthening the rights of the child, and giving children a status as equal rights-holders to adults.
However, is it justifiable and reasonable to make children go through an international complaints procedure for alleged human rights violations? Especially when the process of going through judicial procedures includes a high risk of re-traumatisation? It is genuinely difficult even for adults to overcome the psychological pressure involved in such a procedure, where the victim is required to often continuously re-tell the traumatic event and alleged violation is continuously discussed and requiring for explanations and re-telling the story.
While this holds true, and we can all agree that no child should ever be forced to undergo such procedure without full consent and awareness of the implications of doing so, we must not forget that children, just like adults, are survivors rather than victims and that bringing the wrongs committed against them to justice is crucial for the protection of their rights and future well-being.
In working on IRCT’s project on children and torture, it has become clear that where national complaints mechanisms are ineffective or non-existent, tortured children are left unable to seek redress. Furthermore, we have seen cases where children who are tortured have had to face their perpetrator in court. As a result, they are subjected to repercussions and threats from their perpetrators not to file a complaint.
We must take this opportunity to expose the horrific practice of child torture by bringing it to the international level. We encourage States to sign the Optional Protocol for the CRC, as to provide this much-needed mechanism for children to take up their rights and find justice for the crimes perpetrated against them.
Please see the IRCT’s press release calling on states to sign the Optional Protocol to the CRC here.
Line, a sociologist specialising in human rights, implements the research project on children and torture in Asia.
Freedom from torture: a right for all
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings on 22/02/2012
Abu Qatada case shows how principles of human rights and freedom from torture extend to all – even the despised
The British press have been quite excitable in their coverage of Abu Qatada’s deportation case recently.
The 51-year-old preacher has been excused of providing religious backing to terrorism, including the September 11 attacks on the U.S.; others allege he has been closely connected with the Al Qaeda terror network.
He has lived in the UK since 1993, when he entered on a fraudulent passport. And many seem to want him out.
As such, for the last 10 years, the British government has been trying to deport Qatada to Jordan, where he stands accused in military trials of assisting in terrorism attacks.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Qatada cannot be deported to Jordan because of the risk he may be tortured and that evidence from torture may be used in his trial there.
And while many British newspapers have focused on the issue of torture – and many more on the millions of pounds it has cost the UK to monitor, detain, and process Qatada – the principles of ‘non-refoulement’ at the basis of the Courts decision remain hazy amidst the outcry.
Non-refoulement is proscribed in the UN Convention against Torture – which both the UK and Jordan have ratified. Basically, it means that a country may not deport a person to a country: where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
While the Prince of Jordan has made public assertions that it is “illogical” to believe Qatada would be tortured if deported to Jordan, the European Court is not of the same opinion.
Atlas of Torture, a project of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna, provides profiles of countries human rights and torture records based on reports from UN Special Rapporteurs, the UN Committee against Torture, and the Sub-committee for the Prevention of Torture. Of Jordan, they state that: “It was alleged that torture was commonly practised to extract confessions or to obtain intelligence between the time of arrest and transfer to pre-trial detention… The Special Rapporteur thus concluded that the practice of torture was widespread in Jordan and that torture was routinely used…”
To circumvent its obligations as regards non-refoulment, the UK Home Office has sought assurances from Jordan that Qatada will not be tortured, a naïve undertaking at best. Some members of parliament have gone so far as to suggest that the UK should simply temporarily withdraw from the human rights treaty to thus continue with the deportation.
These are all outrageous suggestions. The UK has deported Tamils and Congolese to their home countries when there was evidence they would be tortured, when nearly at the same moment, during the announcement of the Detainee Inquiry, Prime Minister David Cameron stated, “Our reputation as a country that believes in human rights, fairness and the rule of law – indeed for much of what the services exist to protect – risks being tarnished.”
The rule of law, the UN Convention against Torture, is not something one can simply ignore – or withdraw from – temporarily.
Tessa is communications assistant at the IRCT
Conference to enhance the use of forensic evidence to expose torture
Posted by IRCT in Forensics - Project Work on 15/02/2012
Today is the first day of our conference in Washington, D.C. on the use of forensic evidence in the fight against torture. Speakers will include current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez; Claudio Grossman, the chair of the UN Committee against Torture; and other legal and medical experts on torture and documentation from around the world.
To follow the conference, you can watch the webcast from our partners the American University Washington College of Law (Wednesday and Thursday) or follow us on Twitter, where we will use the event hashtag #ExposeTorture.
Here is the full agenda of the event.
After the cloud of tear gas
Posted by IRCT in Middle East North Africa, News & Clippings on 14/02/2012
Focus on Bahrain needed to prevent more human rights violations
Today, as the protesters have made their way from the suburbs of Manama, Bahrain, undoubtedly heading to Pearl roundabout, the security forces quickly made it known – through their sheer presence, the eventual dispersal of tear gas – that they would try to stem the tide of demonstrators at the infamous site. And in the days leading up, the government has continued crackdown and suppression efforts, denying foreigners and foreign press access to Bahrain and hiring public relations firms.
Today marks a year since protesters gathered at Pearl roundabout in Manama, demonstrating against the undemocratic monarchy of Bahrain and calling for reform. Yet, unlike other Arab Spring movements, Bahrain’s demonstrators have often been ‘shouting in the dark’, to employ the title of an Al Jazeera English documentary that chronicled the protests and the resulting crackdown.
Instead of democratic reforms, Bahrainis have faced severe repression, torture, and arbitrary detention. Just last week, Bahrain and Danish citizen and human rights defender Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja wrote a letter to the Danish Foreign Ministry from prison calling for them to push for his release:
Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja’s letter to the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs from prison, 8 Feb 2012http://www.scribd.com/embeds/81440913/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list
In it, he points to an official 500-page government inquiry in Bahrain that documented cases of torture. In addition, there was the highly publicized cases of over a dozen doctors, surgeons, and nurses at a Manama hospital who were sentenced to several years in prison after being tortured to confess. Their alleged ‘crime’: Doing their job as doctors and treating the wounded and dying protesters coming from Pearl roundabout after security forces cracked down.
All these cases, and yet it seems the torture continues in Bahrain. Within the last year, demonstrators have continued to take to the streets; and many are apprehended, detained, and torture by security forces. We hope on this anniversary that the international world focuses on Bahrain.
“What Bahrainis need is international pressure, international attention to stop the torture, stop the human rights violations; then, we can fight for democracy ourselves,” said Maryam Al-Khawaja, daugher of Abdulhadi and current foreign affairs officer from the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, during a panel discussion last year.
In Haiti – and U.S. – impunity must end
Posted by IRCT in Justice, Latin America & the Caribbean, News & Clippings, North America on 06/02/2012
Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier was president of Haiti from 1971-1986, during which thousands of Haitians were brutally tortured, killed, or 'disappeared' during his 15-year regime. Photo under Creative Commons license, by a-birdie.
“Moving forward” and “learning lessons” cannot be done without holding perpetrators of torture to account
After 25 years in exile, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the former ‘president for life’ responsible for the deaths of over 30,000 Haitians, returned to his country and was promptly put on trial.
However, much to the likely devastation of the survivors of his torturous regime and the families of victims killed during his term, he has only been charged with corruption and embezzlement. There are to be no charges for the torture, extrajudicial killings, and ‘disappearances’ that the victims of his crimes deserve to see him held accountable for.
And both expectantly and deservedly, the condemnations of the Haitian decision have come flooding in. From the Washington Post Editorial Board to the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the magistrate responsible for the decision has been unanimously vilified for allowing Duvalier impunity for his most heinous crimes and human rights violations. I agree that Duvalier should be held accountable and that this recent decision was rightfully worthy of condemnation.
However, a common from Haiti’s current president caught my attention: Asked about the Duvalier case, President Martelly told The Washington Post: “It is part of the past. We need to learn our lessons and move forward.”
President Martelly’s language is markedly similar to another leader a little to the north of the island nation. The current U.S. administration has refused to pursue an investigation or charges against top Bush Administration officials for allegations of torture committed during the so-called ‘war on terror’, with Obama saying in a statement that it is a “time for reflection, not retribution”. These crimes too have been swept under the carpet, despite international obligations to properly investigate and hold perpetrators to account.
Yet both Duvalier and U.S. government officials need to be held to account for their crimes. Sweeping the responsibility for these crimes under the rug not only fails the state’s obligations to the survivors and victims’ families; it perpetuates a cycle of impunity, and gives a free rein for torturers to continue.
Tessa is a communications assistant at the IRCT.
Global crime: The horror of child torture
Posted by IRCT in News & Clippings, Voices on 31/01/2012
A Google search on “child torture” today, the 31st of January 2012 yields headlines like these: Children tortured, killed during Syrian regime’s crackdown: UN; UN: ‘Numerous’ reports of child torture by Syria; UN: Syrian forces killed, tortured 256 children.
Torture of children is not a “new” thing, but a thing that rarely surfaces in such a clear form as in the news on Syria. The situation in Syria has attracted the attention of high-level segments in the international community – with good reason. Syria is in the hot spot, so hot that headlines have (finally) placed the words “children and torture” in the same sentence. In the world of international politics and policies, this connection is not a common sight – especially in headlines.
One of the aims of the IRCT’s ongoing project on children is to bring more attention to the fact that children are being tortured, and headlines like those on Syria make one want to grasp the opportunity to raise the issue: torture of children is not only happening in Syria but in many places of the world. Everyday. It needs to be said loud and clear and more and more. If not, I worry that we will not be able to address it for what it is.
This is not to say that no-one is saying anything about children being tortured – data on the torture of children exists (all PDFs). However, it is often drowned in a wider discourse on violence against children in which distinctions between child abuse and child torture are blurred. All violence against children is inexcusable and horrific, no doubt about that, but we need to call it what it is in order to better fight it. Violence against children in detention, care and justice institutions, and police lock-ups amounts to torture because these institutions are run by public authorities.
The controversy of placing the words children and torture in the same sentence makes the issue a delicate and difficult one to address – this also makes it difficult to fundraise for. It is alarming to say that children are being tortured. The uneven balance of power that exists between a torturer and the tortured becomes incomprehensible when imagining that the tortured is a child.
Children are in a developmental stage of their lives and have yet to develop the coping skills of adults. The threshold of pain and suffering in particular makes this horrific act, when committed against a child, all the more chilling. It is commonly held that the special vulnerability of children renders them more susceptible to the physical and psychological effects of torture. Younger children, in particular, have a lower threshold of pain; and physical or mental abuse may have a much more profound impact on the body and mind of a developing child than on an adult.
The deployment of a Special Representative on Violence Against Children in 2009 has generated new and needed attention to the scope of violence committed against children in the world of today. This said, a review of NGO reports to the Committee on the Rights of the Child concluded that the availability of information from NGOs on violence against children is “uneven“. There is need to improve the reporting of this crime. And it needs to happen now.
Children are also fighters and survivors – and children who have been tortured can overcome the horrors, if they receive proper and timely treatment. The main objectives of IRCT’s project on children and torture is to raise awareness of the fact we need to improve documentation on cases of child torture and to develop child-appropriate rehabilitation for child survivors of torture. Not least we need to prevent it from happening. In order to do this, we first need to recognize the awful truth: that it exists and is widespread.
Line, a sociologist specialising in human rights, implements the research project on children and torture in Asia.
(Not) “Only incompetent investigation officers believe in torture”
Posted by IRCT in Asia, News & Clippings on 24/01/2012
While the HRW reports a disastrous year for human rights in Pakistan, positive signals are arriving from Punjab. The province’s police have been instructed to stop torturing suspects in custody after the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights took note of media reports of an ‘increasing trend of police torture’ in the province. Read the news here.
We welcome the news that the committee seem to have convinced the police to revise their investigation methods and concentrate on collecting physical evidence using forensic techniques rather than coercing suspects into making confessions. It also called for improvements in the recruitment and training of police and other law enforcement personnel.
According to the committee “Only incompetent investigation officers believe in torture”. Yet sadly, it’s not just incompetent police officers who torture. Despite being a gross violation of human rights, which has many times been proved inefficient, many prison officers and detention staff, military personnel, paramilitary forces, state-controlled contra-guerilla forces, and even some health and legal professionals still believe in it. Read more about who the perpetrators of torture are.
Seeking justice
Take courage friends; the road is often long, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. But deep down, you are not alone.
Watch this video featuring a TED Talk from Karen Tse, a human rights lawyer from a fellow anti-torture organisation International Bridges to Justice.
