UGANDA
The use of torture as a tool of interrogation has featured prominently in escalating human rights violations by Ugandan security and military forces since 2001. Official and ad hoc military, security and intelligence agencies of the Ugandan government have illegally detained and tortured suspects, seeking to force confessions of links to past political opponents or current rebel groups.
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Forms of torture in use in Uganda include kandoya (tying the victim's hands and feet behind his or her body) and suspending detainees tied in this manner from the ceiling; "Liverpool" water torture (forcing the victim to lie face up, mouth open, under a flowing water spigot); severe and repeated beatings with metal or wooden poles, cables, hammers and sticks with nails protruding; pistol-whipping; electrocution; male and female genital and body mutilation; death threats (through showing fresh graves, corpses and snakes); strangulation; isolation; and verbal abuse and humiliation. Some of these practices have resulted in the death of detainees in custody. An informal survey at Kigo Prison near Kampala, where "political" detainees are held, indicated in June 2003 that 90 percent of detainees/prisoners had been tortured during their prior detention by state military and security agencies.
The proceeding document features Africa-related excerpts from a Human Rights Watch press release.
Torture Worldwide
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Human Rights Watch (Washington, DC)
PRESS RELEASE
April 27, 2005
Posted to the web May 2, 2005
As indicated by the summaries below, drawn from Human Rights Watch research in 2004 and 2005, many countries continue to brutalize detainees or suspects. Some governments justify such abuses as inevitable in the global war on terrorism. Others use the excuse of more local enemies. But in any context, such abuses have terrible long-term consequences, destroy the lives of detainees, dehumanize interrogators, and are absolutely prohibited by universally agreed-upon standards.
EGYPT
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Authorities in Egypt use torture on a wide scale. Suspected Islamist militants have borne the brunt of these practices, but the impunity enjoyed by the State Security Investigations (SSI) arm of the Ministry of Interior has helped to foster a culture of brutality in ordinary police work as well. The government-appointed National Council for Human Rights, in its first annual report, published belatedly in April 2005, acknowledged that torture is part of "normal investigative practice" in Egypt.
The defeat of the Islamist insurgency by the end of the 1990s has in no way mitigated the problem. Egyptian human rights organizations reported twenty cases of deaths in custody as a result of torture in 2003 and 2004. Of the 292 known torture cases over the past decade, the single greatest number occurred in SSI offices. In February 2005 Human Rights Watch published the results of its investigation into the government's response to the October 2004 bomb attacks against the Taba Hilton hotel and other tourist sites (URL Taba report), which included credible evidence that the SSI routinely used torture in interrogating thousands of persons taken into custody, most of whom continue to remain in detention without charge.
Despite Egypt's terrible record of torture and ill-treatment, governments in the region and in the West, including the United States, have "rendered" wanted suspects to Cairo and into the hands of the SSI, in clear violation of the principle of non-refoulement. One of these persons was Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen of Egyptian origin captured in Pakistan in October 2001 and transferred by the United States to Egyptian custody for six months and then to Guantanamo Bay. He was released from there without charge in January 2005. While he was in Egypt, according to a court affidavit filed by his U.S. lawyer, "he was subjected to unspeakable brutality," including severe beatings for hours at a time and electric shock treatment of "ingenious cruelty."
Another such case was the December 2001 transfers of Ahmad Agiza and Muhammad al-Zari from Sweden to Egypt. There is considerable evidence that Egyptian security agents tortured the men during detention. Agiza reported that he was subject to repeated beatings and electric shocks, after which a cream was applied to minimize evidence of burn, and that he was at one point left chained and blindfolded for 10 days, during which he urinated and defecated on himself. He also alleged that he was made to lick food off the prison floor.
The rendition of persons to countries that practice torture has been especially problematic among the member states of the Arab League. Of the fifty-six persons known to have been rendered to Egypt over the past decade, thirty-two have been sent there by neighboring Arab countries. In a number of cases, these renditions have involved "swaps" for persons wanted by the sending country, such as Yemen and Libya, where torture is also practiced. The Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which has provided the legal framework for such renditions since it came into effect in April 1998, assumes that such decisions remain in the hands of the executive branches of the governments concerned, with no meaningful role for judicial review or attention to due process concerns in approving extradition requests. Nowhere does the Convention affirm the prohibition against refoulement: indeed, it appears intended to facilitate transfers of persons by short-circuit ing torture concerns.
MOROCCO
Morocco has been no exception to the global backsliding in the protection of civil liberties and basic freedoms in the name of counter-terrorism. Recent credible reports of torture and mistreatment of suspects, and the denial of the right to a fair trial, suggest that the broader freedoms Moroccans have enjoyed during the last decade and-a-half can be reversed.
The arrests began after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, and escalated significantly after May 16, 2003 bombings in Casablanca, Morocco's largest city, when twelve suicide bombers killed thirty-three people and wounded another 100 in coordinated attacks. In the months following the May 2003 attack, police carried out massive arrests and home searches without judicial warrants, arresting at least 2,000.
Many detainees have said that their interrogators subjected them to physical and mental torture and degrading treatment in order to extract a confession or to induce them to sign a statement they had not made. As documented in a recent Human Rights Watch report, defendants either were not informed of their right to a medical examination or not able to exercise it in a meaningful manner.
NIGERIA
Torture and ill-treatment of criminal suspects in police custody is systematic and routine in Nigeria, with a strong correlation between the severity of the ill-treatment inflicted and the severity of the alleged offense. As a result, armed robbery and murder suspects are generally the most seriously abused and suffer the harshest treatment in detention.
The most common forms of ill-treatment experienced are repeated beatings with implements such as batons, sticks, planks of wood, koboko (horsewhip), gora (wooden roofing material), iron bars or cable wire. During a recent fact-finding mission by Human Rights Watch, suspects described being hung by their arms in various positions from the ceiling or across a metal rod suspended between tables. Beatings are applied to the back, limbs, joints, and in extreme cases the head. They are usually carried out for 20-30 minutes on two or three separate occasions, on the same day or a few days apart. A number of victims had tear gas power rubbed in their eyes, and one woman had it sprayed on her genitals. In three cases broom strands were inserted into the male victims' penis, one had pliers used on his genitals, another electric shock treatment. In Lagos, five men interviewed had been shot with a gun in one or both feet.
UGANDA
The use of torture as a tool of interrogation has featured prominently in escalating human rights violations by Ugandan security and military forces since 2001. Official and ad hoc military, security and intelligence agencies of the Ugandan government have illegally detained and tortured suspects, seeking to force confessions of links to past political opponents or current rebel groups.
|
Forms of torture in use in Uganda include kandoya (tying the victim's hands and feet behind his or her body) and suspending detainees tied in this manner from the ceiling; "Liverpool" water torture (forcing the victim to lie face up, mouth open, under a flowing water spigot); severe and repeated beatings with metal or wooden poles, cables, hammers and sticks with nails protruding; pistol-whipping; electrocution; male and female genital and body mutilation; death threats (through showing fresh graves, corpses and snakes); strangulation; isolation; and verbal abuse and humiliation. Some of these practices have resulted in the death of detainees in custody. An informal survey at Kigo Prison near Kampala, where "political" detainees are held, indicated in June 2003 that 90 percent of detainees/prisoners had been tortured during their prior detention by state military and security agencies.
The proceeding document features Africa-related excerpts from a Human Rights Watch press release.
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