Why Would I Ever Torment Myself Again
Torture is when somebody in an official chapters inflicts astringent mental or concrete pain or suffering on somebody else for a specific purpose. Sometimes regime torture a person to extract a confession for a crime, or to become information from them. Sometimes torture is simply used every bit a punishment that spreads fear in society.
Torture methods vary. They can be of a physical nature, like beatings and electric shocks. It can be of a sexual nature, like rape or sexual humiliation. Or they can be of a psychological nature, similar slumber impecuniousness or prolonged solitary confinement.
Under international law, torture and other forms of ill-treatment are always illegal. They have been outlawed internationally for decades. To have just a couple of examples, 172 countries have adhered to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture and other forms of ill-treatment, and 165 countries are parties to the UN Convention against Torture which Amnesty International campaigned hard to create.
But many states have failed to criminalize torture as a specific offence under their national laws, and governments around the globe continue to defy international law past torturing people. Betwixt January 2009 and May 2013, Immunity International received reports of torture in 141 countries, from every region of the world.
Torture can never be justified. It is barbaric and inhumane, and replaces the rule of law with terror. No one is prophylactic when governments allow its apply.
High profile torture cases, such as the CIA hole-and-corner detention program around the world, have led to a common misconception that torture is by and large bars to issues around national security and counter-terrorism.
But Immunity's research shows that it could happen to anyone – footling criminals, people from ethnic minorities, protesters, student activists, and people who were but in the incorrect place at the wrong time.
It is nigh often poor and marginalized people who get beaten, humiliated or raped by constabulary and other officials when there is no 1 to protect them or hear their cries for help.
Torture of protesters in Egypt
During the 2011 uprising in Arab republic of egypt, the security forces used torture every bit a weapon against protesters. For a group of xviii detained women protesters, this took the form of strip searches and "virginity tests" which were forced upon them after ground forces officers violently cleared Tahrir Square on 9 March 2011. Seventeen of the women were as well beaten, prodded with electric stupor batons and threatened with prostitution charges.
Amnesty believes that subjecting women to such degrading procedures as "virginity tests" is nothing less than torture.
In Jan 2014, Mahmoud Hussein, then 18 years old, was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Nation Without Torture". He went on to spend more than 2 years in jail.
The government passed a new counterterrorism legislation that has further eroded the few existing safeguards against torture and other ill-treatment, while the do has remained owned.
What is Amnesty doing to fight torture?
Torture often happens in hush-hush – in police lock-ups, interrogation rooms or prisons. For more than 50 years Immunity International has been documenting torture, exposing the perpetrators and helping victims get justice.
We brand people aware of their rights and brand sure that governments who torture can't go away with it.
We are campaigning for the adoption and implementation of measures to protect people from torture and bring the perpetrators to justice. These include contained checks on detention centres, monitoring of interrogations, prompt access to lawyers and courts, visits and communication with family unit members, and thorough and constructive investigations into torture allegations.
And we fight for justice for victims of torture.
Like Moses Akatugba, who spent x years on death row in Nigeria post-obit his conviction for stealing three mobile phones. Police officers tortured Moses to force him to confess, using pliers to pull out his toenails and fingernails.
Equally function of Immunity'southward End Torture campaign, more than than 800,000 people worldwide wrote to the Delta Land Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan asking him to release Moses.
Moses had a message for everyone who took action on his behalf:
'I didn't know the campaigners before, I accept not seen them before, but I cried for assist and they responded massively to relieve me. I didn't know that people however have such great love for their fellow man beings."
Nobody should turn a profit from pain
But from spike batons to electrick shock vests, thumb cuffs and leg irons, the 'tools of torture' are nonetheless being trade3d effectually the world. Companies also continue to sell regular law enforcement equipment, such every bit simple handcuffs, truncheons and pepper spray, to security forces which misuse information technology in acts of torture.
In 2006, years of campaigning past Immunity International and the Omega Research Foundation led to the European union adopting the world'south offset legally binding regulation for controlling the trade in the 'tools of torture'.
We are now campaigning for like international regulation to prohibit the manufacture and sale of abusive equipment and regulate the merchandise in goods that can be misused. It's high fourth dimension the international community took steps to control this shameful trade.
Case study: Saydnaya Prison house
Syria'southward Saydnaya War machine Prison. Quondam detainees described beingness packed into filthy, overcrowded cells without admission to fresh air, sunlight or ventilation, and being tortured from the moment of their arrest. Meagre scraps of food are thrown onto jail cell floors covered with blood from prisoners' wounds.
Many of the prisoners said they were raped or forced to rape other prisoners. Torture and other ill-treatment, including beatings, are used as a regular form of penalisation and degradation, often leading to lifelong damage, disability or fifty-fifty decease. They are also used to excerpt false confessions, which are then used as "evidence" to sentence people to death.
Thousands of people take died in Saydnaya Military machine Prison house. Many were hanged in cloak-and-dagger mass executions; others have died of affliction or starvation or been tortured to death. Amnesty's research helped shine a light on the horrors that take place behind Saydnaya's secretive walls.Explore Saydnaya
Torture methods
When we think of torture and other forms of sick-treatment, we oft recollect of things like stress positions, electric shocks and waterboarding, and these barbaric practices do happen routinely in many countries.
Simply such abuses tin can also include things similar inhumane prison conditions, lonely confinement, and denial of medical treatment.
Case study: Australia's torture of refugees and aviary seekers
Since 2015, the Australian government has been forcibly transferring refugees and aviary seekers who arrive in Commonwealth of australia past boat to camps in Papua New Republic of guinea and Nauru.
In these remote locations, refugees and asylum seekers live in punitive conditions with no opportunity to seek freedom and protection. Hostility from the local population sometimes leads to fierce physical or sexual assaults, and refugees are denied access to adequate healthcare. Refugees and asylum seekers suffer high rates of mental illness and cocky harm with the ongoing uncertainty existence a major contributing factor. There have been 12 deaths on Hand and Republic of nauru since the inception of these cruel policies.
Australia's "offshore processing system" amounts to torture and other ill-treatment considering of the astringent mental and physical harm experienced, and considering information technology is intentionally designed to impairment people in order to deter others from coming to Australia.
Why do governments torture?
Governments ofttimes apply national security every bit a pretext for torturing people. In Republic of cameroon for case, Immunity has documented how the security forces have gear up secret torture chambers for people accused, oft with zip testify, of beingness members of the armed group Boko Haram.
Fatima (not her real name) told Amnesty International how she was held incommunicado at a military base of operations for nine months. She was browbeaten with various objects, including wooden sticks and the flat part of a machete.
"At the base in Kousseri, I was held in a cell with two women," she said. "[The soldiers] beat me for three days all over my trunk, especially on the soles of my anxiety, with all sorts of objects, in order to make me admit things I knew cypher virtually. By the end of the third twenty-four hour period, my soles were going to explode."
Torture and the "war on terror"
Guantánamo Bay was established by the United states in Jan 2002 and has since go emblematic of the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.s.a. government in the proper name of fighting terrorism. Hundreds of people were held there for years without charge and subjected to torture (or what the US calls "enhanced interrogation techniques").
One-time detainees accept described being waterboarded, deprived of slumber, subjected to abiding diggings music and freezing temperatures, or forced into stress positions. Immunity International has been campaigning for all Guantanamo detainees to exist either immediately released or charged with a recognizable offense. Forty prisoners are even so in Guantánamo.
The CIA is also known to have run underground detention facilities or "black sites" in numerous locations around the world. A report from the US Senate Intelligence Committee described how i prisoner was handcuffed to an overhead bar which would not allow him to lower his arms for 22 hours each mean solar day for ii consecutive days. He was also forced to vesture a diaper.
Immunity International has worked tirelessly to expose the complicity of a number of countries in the United states of america secret detention and rendition programme. In the past decade, information technology has intervened in cases brought by two Guantánamo detainees,
Why cancel torture?
The employ of torture destroys people, corrodes the rule of law, undermines the criminal justice system and erodes public trust in public institutions and the state they represent.
It causes astringent hurting and suffering to victims which continues long after the acts of torture stop.
And information technology doesn't work.
Why torture doesn't work
A common myth about torture is that sometimes it is the simply manner to become information that could salvage lives.
States take a huge variety of ways to collect information on crimes – both past and planned – without losing their humanity. Torture is a primitive and blunt instrument for obtaining data.
Around the globe torture is routinely used to extract confessions. Information obtained in this style is not reliable considering people volition say anything under torture just to make the hurting stop. They will say what they think their torturers desire to hear.
In Baronial 2012, Mexican marines broke into Claudia Medina's home and took her to the local navy base of operations where she was given electric shocks, wrapped in plastic and browbeaten, and forced to inhale chilli.
She was forced to sign a confession she had not even read. "If they had not tortured me, I would not accept signed the argument," Claudia said.
Under international law, confessions given under torture exercise not count equally evidence.
In legal terms, the absolute prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment is "non-derogable" – that means it cannot be relaxed even in times of emergency.
Redress for victims of torture
Torture victims face a range of devastating long-term consequences. The concrete and psychological pain inflicted on them tin can lead to chronic pain and disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. This is why it is so important that people who have been tortured have access to redress, and that their torturers are brought to justice.
Redress can include medical care, counselling, monetary compensation, rehabilitation and reintegration into order.
Amnesty International has for years helped torture survivors to get justice. People like Ángel Colón, who was released in October 2014, near six years after he was tortured and wrongly imprisoned in Mexico. More than 20,000 Amnesty supporters demanded his release. Ángel told us: "My bulletin to all those who are showing me their solidarity, and are confronting torture and discrimination, is 'don't drop your guard. A new horizon is dawning'."
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Source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/torture/
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