Christians and Muslims slam everyday torture in Pakistan
ahore (AsiaNews) – Pakistan’s Anti Torture Alliance (ATA) adopted a resolution yesterday calling on the government to pass legislation to outlaw torture by the country’s police and penitentiary institutions.
The appeal was made public at a press conference to mark International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which falls today.
In addition to ATA, organisers included the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) and the Asia Human Rights Commission (AHRC). Panellists included Christian and Muslim activists.
The resolution called on the authorities to respect and protect fundamental human rights. In particular, it called for a ban on torture and an end to the impunity enjoyed so far by law enforcement agencies.
At the same time, it urged the government to setup up victim rehabilitation centres, respect international treaties, modernise the judicial system, free those who have been unjustly arrested, and improve the treatment of prisoners in police stations. It must equally guarantee the safety of activists, journalists, opposition politicians, writers and students.
For Tanveer Jahan, director of the Democratic Commission for Human Development, police and security agencies are the main culprits in torture cases.
A person in custody is safe only if he has political connections or deep pockets to bribe officials. Intimidating and torturing suspects to extract confession is common practice.
At a press conference, the director presented the results of a recent study based on interviews with a thousand jailed inmates in three Punjab districts, in east-central Pakistan.
"Half of them said they had been the victim of torture,” he said. “I was stunned by their courageous statements, which they made in front of cops in courthouse lockups (Bakhshi khanas in Urdu). They knew they would pay dearly for what they said once back in prison in the evening."
Pakistan ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture in 2010 but has done very little to implement it. The convention itself was adopted in 1984, and came into effect three years later.
In January of this year, the Senate passed an anti-torture bill that critics have deemed “toothless” because it is full of ambiguities.
Although only 14 deaths were formally recorded in 2014, 63 people (including four women and two children) are known to have died in prison, this according to a report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
In addition, at least 47 people (including seven women) endured some form of custodial torture last year.
Some of the speakers at the press conference also noted that a department associated with the military runs 52 private torture cells and that in the country there are 1,300 police stations in which at least one person is tortured every day.
"The primitive methods of the three degrees of torture are still being applied,” Samson Salamat, director of the Centre for Human Rights Education, told AsiaNews.
“The life of anyone who survives is destroyed. What is needed for an independent judicial probe is effective legislation, a proper legal system and zero tolerance for offenders".
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