HUMAN RIGHTS: UN Committee against Torture Faults US Record

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 15 2000 (IPS) - The United Nations (UN) Committee against Torture expressed its concern Monday for the failure of the United States to classify this human rights crime under federal jurisdiction in terms consistent with the standards set by the world Convention against Torture.

This specialised UN organisation also conveyed its alarm about the number of cases of mistreatment perpetrated by police against civilians and for similar violent incidents in the US prison system.

A major portion of the abuse attributed to police and prison guards is apparently based on discrimination, said the committee, which is entrusted with studying the compliance of signing countries with the Convention’s terms.

Sources close to the committee say the conclusions and recommendations in response to the US report, released Monday, “are close to the normal average” of observations the committee formulates about the countries that have ratified the Convention.

Without adding much commentary, the US delegation present at the hearing thanked the committee for its assessment and assured that the recommendations would be brought to the attention of government authorities in Washington DC.

Last week, when the UN committee initiated discussions on the US case, the nation’s assistant secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, Harold Hongju Koh, said he was “very proud of our record in eliminating torture.”

But, he added, “we acknowledge continuing areas of concern in the United States.”

Also last week, Amnesty International, the London-based human rights defence organisation, demanded that the UN committee condemn the United States for the cases of torture reported there, primarily occurring at the hands of police and prison guards.

The Committee against Torture, made up of 10 independent experts, said it was also concerned about allegations of sexual assault against female detainees and prisoners, perpetrated by law enforcement officers and prison staff.

Detained and imprisoned women are often subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment, said the committee.

Another cause of concern was the use of electro-shock devices and other methods of restraint that violate the explicit provisions of the Convention against Torture.

During the current period of sessions – May 1 through 19 – the committee observed that in Poland some sectors of the police force engaged in aggressive behaviours against detainees, with some incidents resulting in death.

The committee also condemned the persistence in the Polish army of a practice known as “fala,” under which new recruits are subjected to abuse and humiliation.

In the case of Portugal, the committee expressed concern about the continuing reports about deaths and mistreatment “arising out of contact by members of the public with police,” and the ongoing inter-prisoner violence in the nation’s prisons.

In its analysis of the situation in China, the UN committee was disturbed by persistent allegations of serious incidents of torture, especially involving Tibetans and other national minorities.

The UN agency recommended that authorities in Beijing “incorporate a definition of torture into its domestic law that fully complies with the definition contained in the Convention.”

The committee also called on Paraguay to adopt the same definition of such crimes, and made additional recommendations condemning the acts of torture that continue to occur at the country’s police stations.

Its conclusions also mentioned cases of torture within the Paraguayan armed forces entailing the ill treatment of recruits.

In response to the UN committee’s evaluation, the Paraguayan delegation said the country had found members of the Gen. Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) guilty of crimes of torture and had sentenced them to terms of up to 25 years in prison.

Paraguay, according to the delegates, was the only country from Latin America’s Southern Cone (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) that had not decreed amnesty for human rights crimes committed under the dictatorships that dominated this region in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the Paraguayan representatives in Geneva regretted that many individuals responsible for torture in their country remain at large. Specifically, Brazil refused to extradite Stroessner to Paraguay on the pretext that he had obtained political asylum there. Similarly, Honduras had also denied extradition of the Paraguayan dictatorship’s Interior minister, Sabino Augusto Montanaro.