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Torture by Police, Forced Disappearance & Other Ill Treatment Background |
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Eight of 10
Countries Ill-Treat and Torture Citizens: Amnesty Lucy Westcott, Newsweek, 25 February 2015 www.newsweek.com/eight-10-countries-ill-treat-and-torture-citizens-amnesty-309274?piano_t=1 [accessed 31 March 2015] A majority of the world’s countries torture or
mistreat their citizens, and more people are at risk this year from the
threat of violent armed groups, according to a far-reaching report by Amnesty
International. “We found that last year the number of countries
where both governments and armed groups have gotten away with not protecting
civilians or causing serious human rights violations has been quite
exceptional in the context of conflicts,” said Shetty, citing Iraq, Syria,
Ukraine and Nigeria as examples. A lack of protection for civilians has also led to
the worst refugee crisis since World War II, Amnesty said. There are more
refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people than at any time
since the middle of the 20th century, more than 51 million, according to the
United Nations’s refugee agency. Who’s degraded more
— the torture victim or the torturer? Russ Wellen,
Foreign Policy in Focus FPIF, January 23, 2013 www.fpif.org/blog/whos_degraded_more_the_torture_victim_or_the_torturer [accessed 24 January 2013] connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/88779596/whos-degraded-more-torture-victim-torturer [accessed 14 August 2017] Also, even though interrogators were presumably
vetted to weed out psychopaths, if the practice alone doesn't suggest
unbridled sadism at work, the repetition does. In -- facetiousness alert! --
fairness, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
may have been extraordinarily tough as well as holding out for concessions of
some sort -- better conditions in jail, treatment of their families. Or the repetition may have been a measure of the
interrogator's frustration with the perceived inadequacy of the tools of torture
with which he'd been supplied: "They call this waterboarding and all
we're allowed to use is a common water bottle? Let me dunk his entire head in
a tub and I'll get answers after his first immersion." Perhaps, too, the more they tortured, the more
they hated themselves and took out their anger on their subjects. |
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Diplomatic
Assurances are No Safeguard against Torture Human Rights Watch, April 15, 2005 www.hrw.org/node/11783/section/5 [accessed 6 February 2013] [scroll down] THE LIMITS OF DIPLOMACY -
Diplomacy entails the tactful management of foreign relations to promote the
overall interests of the state. Human rights may be one of those interests,
but it is seldom the only one, and as a consequence diplomacy cannot be an
exclusive and reliable lever for human rights protection. The tender arts of negotiation and compromise that
characterize diplomacy can undermine straightforward and assertive human
rights protection. The fundamental right to be free from torture, however, is
not negotiable or permitting of compromise. Diplomats are often quite candid that their top
priority is to ensure friendly relations with other states, sometimes at the
expense of confronting governments about possible human rights violations,
including about breaches of pre-agreed diplomatic assurances. For example,
when the former Swedish Ambassador to Egypt was asked why he let five weeks
lapse before visiting two Egyptians expelled in December 2001 from Stockholm
to Cairo following diplomatic assurances, he replied that the Swedes could
not have visited the men immediately because that would have signaled a lack
of trust in the Egyptian authorities.[49] The men were held incommunicado in
police custody and subsequently credibly claimed that they had been brutally
mistreated in the course of those five weeks (see section on Sweden below). |
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UN says Pacific
nations should outlaw torture Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC
Radio Australia, 1 July 2013 www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/un-says-pacific-nations-should-outlaw-torture/1154486 [accessed 2 July 2013] The United Nations wants more Pacific nations to
sign up to a convention against torture. HILL: Some people in
the Pacific might come back and say, well these
sound like Western standards of behaviour. In the
Pacific, there are different cultural perceptions. In Fiji, miscreance getting a bit of a hiding at the hands of the
authorities has always been part of it. PNG they might say well, our local
culture is perhaps a little bit more hands on than you have in Western Europe
and North America. Is it entirely appropriate for people in the Pacific to
accept these standards? Is torture or violence ever, in any sense, justified? ROBINSON: We must
reiterate that the community of nations in the world would have to stand by
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948, after
the atrocities of World War Two and so everybody signed - 193 members of the
world - signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights are non-negotiable. In other words,
if you have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in it
Article 5 that says, no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel or
inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment that becomes international law.
And so it doesn't matter what region of the world you're from. These are
human rights standards that all nations in the world should be practicing. Enforced
Disappearances Amnesty International Report, 7 November
2014 [accessed 6 March 2015] [scroll down] An enforced disappearance takes place when a
person is arrested, detained or abducted by the state or agents acting for
the state, who then deny that the person is being held or conceal their
whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law. Very often, people who have disappeared are never
released and their fate remains unknown. Their families and friends may never
find out what has happened to them. But the person has not just vanished. Someone, somewhere, knows what has happened
to them. Someone is responsible. Enforced disappearance is a crime under
international law but all too often the perpetrators are never bought to
justice. Policing and Human
Rights -- Assessing southern African countries’ compliance with the SARPCCO
Code of Conduct for Police Officials Edited by Amanda Dissel
& Cheryl Frank, African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum APCOF, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-920489-81-6 [accessed 25 March 2014] The SARPCCO Constitution outlines certain
principles of cooperation which include: respect for national sovereignty,
equality of the police force/services, nonpolitical professionalism,
non-discrimination and flexibility of working method, and mutual benefit for
all members. Importantly, it refers to the observance of human rights, mutual
respect and goodwill. In furtherance of this commitment to human rights,
SARPCCO held a human rights workshop in Kasame,
Botswana in 2000. The workshop aimed to raise awareness and understanding of
international human rights with regard to the police. It also aimed to
facilitate discussion among police officers as to how police organisations could implement human rights standards and
strengthen human rights-based policing. The meeting recommended the
development of a protocol to facilitate the implementation of human rights in
training and implementation. Accordingly, a Code of Conduct was developed and
adopted at the 6th Annual General Meeting of SARPCCO on 31 August 2001. The Code of Conduct is intended as a minimum
standard for policing in the region. It is guided by respect for all human
life, for reverence of the law, integrity, respect
for property and service excellence. It recognises
that human rights norms and ethical practices are essential aspects of professionalising the police services. "Does Torture
Work?" is an Immoral Question Judith Levine, Boston Review, 29 December
2014 [accessed 5 January 2015] In its wisdom, international law does not ask
whether torture works. But because empathy and moral revulsion are not
sufficient to prevent people, in the name of efficacy, from committing
abominations on the bodies and minds of those under their power, the
civilized world has found it necessary to build an unbreachable
wall around torture—to include it among the injuries from which human rights
doctrine protects everyone. “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form
of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them
information of any kind whatever,” state the Geneva Conventions of 1949. In
fact, the punishment need not be cruel or unusual to be illegal. The
Conventions forbid a captor to so much as “insult” an intransigent prisoner
or expose him to “unpleasant” treatment. Is torture effective? The question is akin to
asking if slavery is good economic policy or forced sterilization is an
effective means of slowing population growth.
Even if torture does work, it is still wrong. And the minute we start
considering it as a tool to select to get the job done—like a wrench or a
pliers to turn a bolt, a spade or pickax to dig a hole—then we do not only
dehumanize those we torture, we cease to be human ourselves. |
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