PRESS CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR VICTIMS OF TORTURE

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR VICTIMS OF TORTURE

Part of the healing process for victims of torture was the end of impunity, which was this year's message for the second observance of the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, said the Officer-in-Charge of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Elsa Stamatopoulou.

Speaking at a Headquarters press conference this morning to mark the occasion, Ms. Stamatopoulou said the messages for the day, from the Secretary General, the High Commissioner and everyone, was a call for governments to support the criminal tribunals and subscribe to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Others taking part in the press conference were Allen Keller, the Director of the Bellevue/New York Program for Torture Survivors; John Salzberg, a representative in Washington, D.C. of the Center for Victims of Torture; and Iain Lavine, a representative of Amnesty International at the United Nations. The press conference moderator from the United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI), Mian Qadrud-Din, drew attention to an exhibit on torture and the rehabilitation of torture survivors in the United Nations Headquarters Public Lobby, on display from 25 June to 6 August.

Ms. Stamatopoulou said the message of the High Commissioner's Office was one of urgency. It conveyed first a moral outrage that the scourge of torture still existed and that, in the past year, the Commission on Human Rights had intervened after receiving allegations of torture from no fewer than 70 countries. The Office also called for recommitment to the fight against torture, as international norms against it already existed and torture was clearly outlawed. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture and Other Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment had made it very clear that international law banned torture and, yet, it continued.

The 1984 anti-torture Convention had made torture into an international crime that meant no "safe haven" existed anywhere for torturers, Ms. Stamatopoulou said. National laws had been encouraged by the fifty-year campaign of the international system against torture, including by the United Nations monitoring system, to which the Commission on Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur against Torture belonged.

Finally, the message was of solidarity with the victims along the three pillars of restitution, rehabilitation and compensation, Ms. Stamatopoulou said. The United Nations had established solidarity a year ago by setting up the first Humanitarian Fund for Victims of Torture, which funded about

130 organizations reaching out to more than 60,000 victims and family members, and $5 million had just been disbursed by the voluntary fund.

John Salzberg, a representative in Washington, D.C. of the Center for Victims of Torture, said his organization had been established in 1988 as the first treatment centre for victims of torture in the United States and the third in the world. In addition to being a treatment centre, the organization sought to increase United States responsibility for the care of torture victims. Over the past year, the United States Congress had adopted landmark legislation in support of victims of torture, including a Torture Victims Relief Act. A contribution of $3 million to the United Nations Voluntary Fund was being considered by Congress, but support of foreign treatment centres had been rejected by the administration.

The Centre for Victims of Torture encouraged United States support of foreign centres, Dr. Salzberg said. Many torture victims overseas were grass roots leaders at the forefront of the struggle for human rights and democracy. Support for treatment centres was an effective way to demonstrate concrete support of those principles. Also, health care professionals working in countries where torture was practised reported those incidents to organizations, such as Amnesty International. That put pressure on offending governments to stop the practice of torture or at least curb its incidence.

Allen Keller, the Director of the Bellevue/New York University Program for Torture Survivors and also speaking on behalf of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, said "tragically, business is booming". The programme, launched in 1995 and supported by the United Nations Voluntary Fund, had cared for more than 400 victims of torture from more than 40 different countries. Five to ten requests for new referrals were received each week on behalf of individuals singled out for religious beliefs, political activities or speaking out. In the year since the first commemoration of the Day, the world had become aware that the plague of torture was not a relic of the past. It was time to seek the truth and exact justice, to focus on impunity and the struggle to end it.

Impunity was not an abstract offence against theoretical notions of justice, Dr. Keller continued. Rather, it was the infliction of a tangible, continuing injury to the direct and indirect victims of torture, an impediment in the individual's and society's healing process. It was the absence of political will or legal framework for clarifying facts, determining responsibility, submitting to due process, imposing punishment and providing reparation for the acts of the cruellest of criminals, the torturers and their employers. The avoidance was manifested by many governments, but torturers had to be brought to justice or else they were vindicated in the eyes of the State and the community. For victims of torture, justice was a critical component of the healing process.

Press Conference on Torture Victims - 3 - 25 June 1999

Impunity was an organized procedure, surreptitious and violent against the whole community. Impunity was associated with authorities not caring for people and not bothering about morality. The population never gained respect for a leadership that ignored the tragedy of both the torture and the impunity, which often resulted in a marked increase in disorganized violence, crime and alienation, especially among the youth. In such a situation, the police and security forces were considered hostile and threatening institutions.

Truth commissions and tribunals had to be established to determine who was responsible, Dr. Keller concluded. Justice in courts had to be the order of the day, so that the guilty were sentenced and not just sanctioned. In that way, victims would begin feeling safe again and future potential torturers would hesitate before employing the butcher's tools. Specific steps that could be taken against impunity were to: support the principles against impunity and the creation of an International Criminal Court; increase financial support to the United Nations Voluntary Fund and other funds; and put pressure on 70 governments to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture, followed with compliance. "Torture survivors do not seek revenge", he said. "They want truth and justice".

Iain Lavine, a representative of Amnesty International at the United Nations, began by describing a victim of torture in Chile who was described by everyone who knew him as a changed man who could never forget the prison experience. The decision in the United Kingdom, allowing the extradition of General Pinochet to face charges for the crimes of torture and conspiracy to torture committed after December 1988, responded to the cries for justice and truth of the victims of human rights violations and their relatives in Chile and throughout the world. It marked an extremely important precedent and perhaps the beginning of the end of impunity for those who tortured their citizens. The approval of the statute of the International Criminal Court was also an important precedent, with its inclusion of torture as one of the crimes over which the court will have jurisdiction.

Even with those developments, the goal of eradicating torture seemed elusive, Mr. Lavine said. Thirty-eight years after Amnesty's founding, its work on torture was not lessening at all. Over the last year, as the annual report showed, the organization reported on allegations of torture and ill- treatment by police and other State authorities in 125 countries. Torture or other degrading behaviour was suspected to have led to deaths in 51 countries.

Amnesty worked in a number of ways, Mr. Lavine said. First, it monitored and documented allegations of torture. Amnesty also worked on urgent actions, writing thousand of letters to governments every year protesting allegations of torture. Amnesty also worked at international lobbying and campaigning, strengthening the commitment of governments to international standards and strengthening international mechanisms for preventing torture. Amnesty also provided information to the Committee

Press Conference on Torture Victims - 4 - 25 June 1999

Against Torture and the Special Rapporteur on Torture, strengthening their work. Sadly and despite all that, Amnesty's new report documented many incidents of torture.

Kosovo, of course, had made the headlines, but other places, like Kenya and Sri Lanka, had not, he said. In Turkey, there were reports of children between the ages of 6 and 8 being beaten and sexually assaulted in prison headquarters. The Universal Declaration asserted that no one should be subjected to torture and yet only 114 governments had accepted an obligation under law to uphold the principle by ratifying the anti-torture Convention, which continued to be the least ratified of all the human rights treaties. Of those States that were party to the Convention, only 40 had recognized the competence of the Committee against Torture to consider individual complaints.

As part of our continued campaigning on this issue, he endorsed the call on Member States to mark the day by committing themselves to ratify the Convention without reservations and, particularly, that they make the necessary declaration under article 22 to consider individual communications, Mr. Lavine said. The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights had urged all States to eradicate the evil of torture. As a further step towards that goal, States should finalize the text of a strong optional protocol to the Convention, which would establish preventative visits to places of detention. "If this were done, we would be a step closer to eliminating one of the most atrocious violations against human dignity", he said.

Asked about the heavy emphasis on government torturers, as opposed to individual actors, such as had been recently alleged against actions of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Ms. Stamatopoulou said the United Nations recognized that non-State actors also committed violations of human rights, but had addressed that issue when discussing particularly grave situations, such as in El Salvador, when violations were committed by both sides. As to the humanitarian side, the Fund supported all kinds of projects, not just for those victimized by a State.

In response to the same question, Dr. Keller said most clients in his programme had been victims of individuals clearly acting in an official capacity, but in the work of the programme itself in providing care, it could not be distinguished whether the torture had been committed by an organization acting in an authoritarian fashion. The physical and psychological consequences would be equal.

Mr. Lavine, on the same issue, cited two instances in Amnesty's report, that involving the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, both of which had committed massive acts of torture, particularly against children. The international community had a huge problem with regard to such groups, because there was no mechanism for being in contact and the groups, of course, couldn't sign up for international treaties and conventions the way governments could. In Sierra

Press Conference on Torture Victims - 5 - 25 June 1999

Leone, peace talks were underway and the kind of amnesty granted was of major concern. "The whole issue of impunity as one moves into a peace process in that kind of situation is extremely critical", he said.

What happened to the 70 complaints received by the Commission? a correspondent asked. Ms. Stomatopoulou explained that the Commission on Human Rights had established the Special Rapporteur against Torture, whose mandate was to extend protection to individuals about whom he heard complaints. When the basic requirements of a serious complaint were present, the Special Rapporteur carried out an urgent appeal, or sent an immediate fax to the government stating the allegation and urging remedy. "Some governments write back and say we're wrong, but the point is that they know we know". Those countries about which allegations were received were listed in the Commission's annual report, soon to be published twice a year. Thus, it was a system of continuing pressure, telling the government and the world that the activities were public.

Asked to elaborate on the nature of the society that allowed torture, Dr. Keller said that when one individual was tortured, the entire society was affected through a ripple effect of fear and terror. In fact, it was the aim of the torturer to send a message to the community that they dare not speak out. Torture undermined an individual's sense of trust, fairness and safety. The torture victim was thus tortured twice; once in terms of what happened to him and then in terms of the torturer getting away with it. So, there was a healing element for the individual and the society in preventing impunity and creating justice. There was also the preventive aspect, preventing torture through justice and adjudging the appropriate punishment.

Elaborating further, Dr. Keller said torturers perhaps considered their victims as less than human, and perhaps even considered them as enemies of the State, thereby seeing themselves as performing a service for society. "And maybe, it is of some concern that perhaps it's a little easier than we think for someone to torture", he said. "That's a good reason for the international instruments we need to control it. Torturers do it because it's effective. They need to find out they can't get away with it".

Asked whether treatment approaches for torture victims were similar, Dr. Keller said the treatment of torture survivors was a fairly new field and there were a lot of initiatives underway to learn what were effective treatments. There were critical components and one was a multidisciplinary approach. When victims experienced the muscular pain from being beaten, they also experienced intrusive, disturbing memories of the abuse. Both had to be addressed. Group work was very effective because torture violated the sense of belonging and groups helped individuals reconnect. Mr. Salzberg said his centre provided both physical and psychological help and by far the most important treatment needed was psychological therapy. Length of treatment could be as long as seven years.

Press Conference on Torture Victims - 6 - 25 June 1999

A correspondent asked about the extent of torture in the United States relative to the Abner Louima case in New York City. Ms. Stamatopoulou said allegations of abuse in the United States had been contained in the last report of the Special Rapporteur. Mr. Lavine said Amnesty International had launched a campaign last year specifically on the United States and a major theme had been police brutality and conditions in prisons. A number of conditions had been reported, including the use of mechanical, chemical and electro-shock types of restraints, which were considered cruel, degrading and even life-threatening. The information was contained in Amnesty's report on the United States.

Finally, in response to a last question, Ms. Stamatopoulou said there were three ways of reporting about situations concerning torture. One was when the agency became "activated" by an individual, family or organization. Another was for the Committee against Torture to look at the country report and other reports in the process of implementing the Convention, looking to see how endemic an alleged problem was. And finally, country specific rapporteurs looked at alleged problems, again endemically.

* *** *