According to a major new report on torture, "torturers continue to inflict physical and mental anguish on countless victims - and to get away with it. While the torturers evade accountability, the wounds of their victims cannot heal and society is poisoned from within".
The report, published today to mark the beginning of an international campaign against torture, says torture continues worldwide despite new international agreements prohibiting torture and setting out governments' obligations to prevent it.
Amnesty International is launching the new global campaign against torture today under the slogan "Take a step to stamp out torture". The campaign is being launched simultaneously in more than 60 countries today, with the support of trade unions, human rights organisations and concerned individuals. During the campaign, Amnesty International will be calling on all world leaders to make a public commitment that they will take steps to stop torture.
The campaign programme includes joint action strategies in 21 countries involving Amnesty International and local organisation. Amnesty is demanding that torturers are held accountable and brought to justice. The global strategy being announced today also includes a campaign against the international trade in torture equipment, and pressure on governments to honour their obligations to ensure everyone can live free of fear. Amnesty International also promises to highlight the torture of children and to challenge governments to ratify and implement the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
In an analysis of reports from 195 countries and territories from the beginning of 1997 to mid-2000, Amnesty International found reports of torture or ill-treatment by state officials in more than 150 countries. "In more than 70 they were widespread or persistent. In more than 80 countries, people reportedly died as a result. The evidence strongly suggests that most of the victims were people suspected or convicted of criminal offences. Most of the torturers were police officers."
Amnesty's report says the fact that the most common victims of torture and ill-treatment are convicted criminals and criminal suspects explains why widespread torture has not sparked a great deal of popular opposition.
"When society's defences are down, any opportunistic pretext - such as the need to combat `terrorism', the fight against crime, or hostility to groups such as asylum seekers - may be used as a licence to torture," it says. Beating is by far the most common method of torture and ill-treatment used by state officials. Amnesty says it has reports of beating from more than 150 countries - virtually all the countries from which torture and ill-treatment have been reported since 1997. Common methods of torture and ill-treatment reported since 1997 include electric shocks (more than 40 countries), rape and sexual abuse in custody (more than 50 countries), suspension of the body (more than 40 countries), beating on the soles of the feet (more than 30 countries), suffocation (more than 30 countries), mock execution or threat of death (more than 50 countries) and prolonged solitary confinement (more than 50 countries).
Judicial corporal punishments, which Amnesty describes as "lawful torture", are on the statute books of at least 31 countries, and since 1997 Amnesty has documented cases of judicial floggings in 14 countries and amputations in seven (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Sudan).
According to Amnesty's survey, conditions of detention amounting to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment were re ported in 90 countries and were widespread in more than 50 countries. More than a million people are being held in grossly over-crowded, pest-ridden and badly-ventilated Russian prisons, where food and medical treatment is often inadequate.
In modern conflicts, terrorising civilian populations has become a common means of waging war, and the report says "this almost inevitably involves torture". According to the survey, torture has been used by state agencies in counter-insurgency operations or during armed conflicts in more than 30 countries since 1997.
The campaign also promises to highlight the links between discrimination and torture, and calls on governments to take action to combat discrimination.
The report welcomes significant steps taken towards establishing the International Criminal Court to try cases of torture and other international crimes against humanity.
The effects of torture reverberate far beyond the suffering of the individual victims. "The consequences on the immediate family, on the community and on society as a whole are both profound and long-lived", the report says. "For the survivors, the worst consequences are often psychological. Many are haunted by deep feelings of guilt and shame: guilt that they have survived while others have not, shame that information they gave under torture may have harmed friends."
Others faced with an "impossible choice" - reveal the names of comrades or watch a loved one being tortured - continue to feel responsible for the outcome long after the physical scars left by the torturer have healed."
Ireland.com - The Irish Times
Amnesty International's campaign, "Take a step to stamp out torture", is being launched in Kilmainham Jail at 11 a.m. today.
The report is available at www.stoptorture.org which allows visitors to access Amnesty International's information about torture and to respond to the campaign. Background documents for work against torture can be found at: www.amnesty.org/torture/resource/index.html
Amnesty International Irish Section is at www.amnesty.ie and can be contacted at: info@amnesty.iol.ie
Patrick Comerford is at theology@ireland.com