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Torture a Big Problem Worldwide, UN Expert Says
Despite a ban on torture, it remains widespread in many countries, the UN's Manfred Nowak recently said in an interview with Deutsche Welle ahead of the UN's International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer who currently serves as the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on Torture, sees reasons for both optimism and concern.
To bring attention to ongoing incidents of mistreatment, the UN is sponsoring an International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on Thursday, June 26.
The day could not come at a more appropriate time as state-sponsored violence against opposition politicians has surged in Zimbabwe ahead of upcoming presidential elections. Yet Nowak also has grave concerns about torture in Brazil, Nigeria and the United States.
Ban on torture often ignored
A landmark UN anti-torture convention has been signed by 145 countries. Yet despite the official ban, mistreatment remains widespread, Nowak said.
It's very rare for him to travel to a country where there aren't substantial allegations of torture. The list of countries who are working hard to combat mistreatment is shockingly short, although Nowak cited Denmark as an example.
"Small mistreatment or excessive police force naturally exists everywhere, but (in Denmark) I have no allegations of torture," Nowak said. "That is really an exception."
North-South divide
Abuse of suspects in police custody remains an issue in countries like Brazil, Nowak said, where half of the population believes torture is a legitimate crime-fighting method. In many countries, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, torture is seen as a way to solve conflicts. Police are also not afraid to treat suspects harshly.
Nigeria is a similar example, Nowak said, where mistreatment is so widespread that "one would be downright surprised if the police followed all the rules exactly."
Nowak says he's particularly worried about the situation in Zimbabwe ahead of elections scheduled for Friday. The UN expert said was recently briefed on a torture rehabilitation center in Harare. The facility operates under very difficult conditions, attempting to provide medical attention and treatment to victims of political violence.
Yet the influx of torture victims in recent months has overwhelmed the facility, Nowak said.
Examples of widespread abuse abound in Asia -- there are reports of torture at prisons in Burma, mistreatment at work camps in China, and human rights violations at detention centers in Uzbekistan. And the list goes on.
Torture leaves difficult legacy
Nowak visited Indonesia in November of 2007 and said he can attest to improvements there since the end of the Suharto regime. Indonesia has become a democratic country that has set an example for its neighbors in Southeast Asia, Nowak said.
Yet there are still plenty of examples of police mistreatment of prisoners in Jakarta and Java, he added. The legacy of torture, developed over decades, is "very, very difficult to eradicate from one day to the next," Nowak said.
There is also concern that some politicians in the US and Europe are putting a higher priority on fighting terror than on protecting human rights. Nowak, one of the authors of a UN report on Guantanamo, has called for the facility to be closed as quickly as possible. He also wants the US to shut down its secret detention facilities.
Independent checks essential
The UN's anti-torture convention got a boost in 2006, when a mechanism came into force that allowed independent international and national bodies to visit prisons.
Nowak said it is now up to European countries, which supported the measure, to put the money and resources into making sure that national prevention mechanisms are put into place.
It's up to countries to ensure that "to as large an extent as possible, torture truly no longer exists," Nowak said.
© Deutsche Welle.
4 Comments so far
Show AllAs long as the USA allows torture, the rest of the world will feel that it is probably OK to allow it under some conditions, and our benighted planet will never gain any sort of real respect for individual rights. Torture is simply an excuse for deliberate sadism perpetated with the connivance of an entire culture of institutional abuse.
Make no mistake: elements of the US Government now are condoning torture and everyone knows it worldwide. Our inabililty to stay safely away from its temptations shows how far we still have to go to deserve any fate but oblivion.
Wow, can you imagine that the US is not the only country that abuses it's prisoners (at gitmo). ALL the moslem countries do and they have been doing it for over 1,000 years, I guess we just learn from the best.
W O L F 1 2 3
Perhaps you're not aware of the once named "School of the Americas", that has maintained the most sophisticated and thorough collection of any torture device or process ever known, and how to improve on them for more pain and better terror potential ?
Your taxpayer dollars hard at work, bringing the "pain of Freedom" ( denied ) to oppressed and enslaved populations across the globe, in your name - to keep YOUR prices low at Walmart.
Your islamic-phobia is nothing compared to the joys awaiting Christians who want to re-visit the INQUISITION torture chambers, which killed no more than 6 million innocent women over 300 years.
If you really want to get tortured really well, why settle for mere amatuers ?
veracity June 29th, 2008 2:42 am
http://askville.amazon.com/people-killed-Inquisition/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3878676
"There were two major Inquisitions, the Medieval Inquisition and Spanish Inquisition. Although there are no exact numbers, scholars believe they have estimated Inquisition deaths reasonably accurately. There were not as many deaths as the popular press claims. Numbers have often been inflated to as high as 9 million by the popular press, with absolutely no scholarly research. This figure is completely erroneous. A broad range of scholars, many of whom were not Catholic, have carefully studied the Inquisitions. They looked at all the existing records and were able to extrapolate. In the Medieval Inquisition, Bernard Gui was one of the most notorious of the medieval inquisitors. (so much so that the sick modern pornography industry has turned him into a hero). He tried 930 people out of which 42 were executed (4.5%). Another famous Inquisitor was Jacques Fournier who tried 114 cases of which 5 were executed (4.3%). Using numbers that are known, scholars have been able to surmise that approximately 2,000 people died in the Medieval Inquisition. (1231-1400 AD)
According to public news reports the book's editor, Prof. Agostino Borromeo, stated that about 125,000 persons were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, of which 1.8% were executed (2,250 people). Most of these deaths occurred in the first decade and a half of the Inquisition's 350 year history. In Portugal of the 13,000 tried in the 16th and early 17th century 5.7% were said to have been condemned to death. News articles did not report if Portugal's higher percentage included those sentenced to death in effigy (i.e. an image burnt instead of the actual person). For example, historian Gustav Henningsen reported that statistical tabulations of 50,000 recorded cases tried by nineteen Spanish tribunals between 1540-1700 found 775 people (1.7%) were actually executed while another 700 (1.4%) were sentenced to death in effigy ("El 'banco de datos' del Santo Oficio: Las relaciones de causas de la Inquisición española, 1550-1700", BRAH, 174, 1977). Jewish historian Steven Katz remarked on the Medieval Inquisition that "in its entirety, the thirteenth and fourteenth century Inquisition put very few people to death and sent few people to prison; 90 percent of its sentences were canonical penances" (The Holocaust in Historical Context, 1994).
During the high point of the Spanish Inquisition from 1478-1530 AD, scholars found that approximately 1,500-2,000 people were found guilty. From that point forward, there are exact records available of all "guilty" sentences which amounted to 775 executions. In the full 200 years of the Spanish Inquisition, less than 1% of the population had any contact with it, people outside of the major cities didn't even know about it. The Inquisition was not applied to Jews or Moslems, unless they were baptised as Christians.
If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 6,000 deaths. These atrocities are completely inexcusable."
Do you always multiply the REAL number by 1000 to get your mythical numbers?
"islamic-phobia" try reading FACT for a change and try,
http://www.hinduwebsite.com/history/holocaust.asp
During these seven hundred years of Muslim invasions and their conquest and rule of India, the Hindus were the greatest sufferers. It is difficult to estimate the number of Hindus who lost their lives during these campaigns, the number of Hindus who lost their lives in the religious persecution perpetrated on the native population by the Muslim rulers or the number of Hindus who were forcibly converted to Islam.
According to Prof. K.S. Lal, the author of the Growth of Muslim population in India, the Hindu population decreased by 80 MILLION between 1000 AD, the year Mahmud Ghazni invaded India and 1525 AD, a year before the battle of Panipat.
One can safely add another 20 million Hindus to this list to account for the number that were killed during the Mughal rule or the rule of the Muslim rulers in the Deccan plateau. By all known accounts of world history, as pointed out by Koenard Elst in his book the Negationism in India, destruction of about 100 million hindus is perhaps the biggest holocaust in the whole world history.