Torture as an institution

Torture does not occur simply because individual torturers are sadistic, even if testimonies verify that they often are. The reports of torture and ill-treatment from over 90 countries demonstrate the presence of a conscious decision to torture by some governments and the lack of any will to stop it by many others. While governments universally and collectively condemn torture, more than a third of the world's governments have used or tolerated torture or ill-treatment of prisoners in the 1980s.

Methods

The methods vary: for example, the longused falanga (beating on the soles of the feet, also called falaka); the Syrians' "black slave", an electrical apparatus that inserts a heated metal skewer into the bound victim's anus; the cachots noirs in Rwanda, black cells totally devoid of light in which prisoners have been held for as long as a year or more. Some

methods-pain-causing drugs administered forcibly to prisoners of conscience in Soviet psychiatric hospitals, the forcible use of techniques of sensory deprivation, and the electrodes that have become an almost universal tool of the torturer's trade-make the verification of torture and ill-treatment especially difficult.

Victims

Victims include people of all social classes, age groups, trades, professions and political or religious views. Criminal suspects as well as political detainees are subject to torture in many countries although the information available to Amnesty. International deals mostly with political

cases.

In El Salvador children have reportedly been tortured, and in Iran under the government at the time of writing children held with their mothers in the women's block of Evin Prison have been forced to witness the torture of their mothers. Women often face special degradation at the hands of their male torturers. Relatives of wanted people in Syria, including adolescents, have reportedly been held as hostages and tortured to force suspects to give themselves up. Foreign nationals seeking asylum in the Congo have allegedly been tortured to force them to confess to espionage.

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Women prisoners in Evin Prison, Iran. One mother who was tortured while being held bere screamed that she was ready to confess when she could no longer stand the agony of ber three-year-old daughter being made to watch.

Victims in Ethiopia have allegedly included members of several ethnic and religious minorities suspected either of supporting armed groups fighting for territorial independence or of obstructing the revolution.

Agents

The agencies involved in torture give an indication of the degree of governmental responsibility for it. Frequently several military and police intelligence units as well as police forces and prison employees are implicated, thus demonstrating the widespread institutionalization of the practice.

The general picture that emerges of torture agencies is often one of groups specially trained to torture, who have an elevated view of their role in protecting state security against "subversives". State propaganda reinforces this view, as does any real violence perpetrated against the state or their colleagues by opposition groups. If they are aware that their acts are criminal, they also know that their superiors will protect them in the unlikely event that the state attempts to prosecute them.

'Preconditions'

Torture most often occurs during a detainee's first days in custody. These vulnerable hours are usually spent incommunicado, when the security forces maintain total control over the fate of the detainee, and deny access to relatives, lawyers or independent doctors. Some detainees are held in secret, and the authorities may deny that certain detainees are held, making it easier to torture or kill them or to make them "disappear".

The suspension of habeas corpus and other legal remedies, trials of political detainees in military courts and the lack of any independent means to examine and record a prisoner's medical condition allow the security forces to conceal evidence of torture from lawyers, civilian magistrates, independent doctors and others who would be capable of taking action against their illegal activities.

Further incentives are trial procedures that do not exclude from evidence statements extracted under torture or during long periods of incommunicado detention, a government's refusal to investigate allegations of torture, its peremptory denial that torture occurs in the face of mounting evidence such as deaths in custody, its obstruction of independent domestic or international investigations, the censorship of published information about torture, and the immunity from criminal and civil prosecution given to alleged torturers.

This photo was taken at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Bogotá, Colombia. during an investigation into the claim by Ernesto Sendoya Guzman that he had been tortured over a period of three days by members of F-2 Police Intelligence. The medical evidence of torture was consistent with his allegation that he had been severely beaten.

The immediate and long-term effects of intense physical and psychological abuse are oppressive.

Torture victims often need social, medical and psychological help after release. Systematic examinations of torture victims conducted by Amnesty International's Danish Medical Group, established in 1974, show that practically all victims suffer from multiple and physical sequelae (after-effects)

to torture.

As one means of treating these victims (and their families, who often have psychosomatic symptoms), several independent doctors and other health workers created a rehabilitation centre for torture victims at the Uni-. versity Hospital of Copenhagen. The centre draws on the experience of medical specialists who have examined and treated victims from several countries. One of the 20 torture victims treated at the centre since it was established in 1982 was a 35-year-old man who had been tortured six years previously by, among several methods, Jalanga. Years later he suffered from pain in his feet and back. He could not walk more than a few hundred metres without great pain in his legs. Following careful physical examination, he was treated with ultrasound techniques and physiotherapy. Two months later he was able to walk, run and play football without pain.

A great many torture victims, of course, cannot obtain medical help.

The moral
argument

Apologists for torture generally concentrate on the classical argument of expediency which purports to justify undesirable but "necessary" suffering inflicted on an individual only for the purpose of protecting the greater good of the greater number. This apology ignores the fact that the majority of torture victims, even In countries beset by widespread civil conflict, have no security Information about violent opposition groups to give away. They are tortured either to force confessions from them or as an acute message not to oppose the government.

Even if torture could be shown to be efficient in some cases, it is never permissible. Torture is a calculated assault on human dignity and for that reason alone is to be condemned absolutely. Nothing denies our common humanity more than the purposeful infliction of unjustified and unjustifiable pain and humiliation on a helpless captive. Once justifled and allowed for the narrower purpose of combating political violence, torture will almost Inevitably be used for a wider range of purposes against an Increasing proportion of the population. Those who torture once will go on using it, encour aged by its "efficiency" in obtain. ing the confession or information they seek, whatever the quality of those statements. They will argue within the security apparatus for the extension of torture to other detention centres; they may form elite groups of interrogators to refine its practice; they may develop methods that hide its more obvious effects; they will find further reasons and needs for It If particular segments of society become restive. What was to be done "just once" will become an Institutionalized practice and will erode the moral and legal prin. ciples that stand against a form of violence that could affect all of society.

As for the state, if it purports to uphold justice, torture should be banned: torture subverts a basic tenet of just punishment, a prescribed penalty for a proven offence. If a government subscribes to the rule of law, torture should be forbidden: most national constitutions as well as

The process of torture

No experience of torture is typical, but there are discernible patterns in the thousands of personal testimonies, affidavits and statements that have reached Amnesty International in the 1980s. For the individual victim torture can mean being seized at night, violently, while family and neighbours are terrorized into helplessness; being blindfolded and beaten in the police van or the unmarked car; the vague reasons, if any, given for the detention; the threats of execution, of rape, of family members being killed in "accidents"; the preliminary questions at the police station or army barracks about present health, medicines, past illnesses, so as not to go too far in the procedures that follow; the sometimes senseless questions (“Why were you born in Tunceli?'') for which there are no answers-and throughout, the anticipation and the fact of brute force, without limit, without end, the knowledge of being beyond the help of family or lawyer, of being totally at the mercy of those whose job it is to have no mercy.

Torture usually means isolation: abduction, secret detention, incommunicado detention beyond the reach of family, friends and legal assistance. Blindfolding during days of interrogation and torture serves to increase the sense of being alone and defenceless. Iranian political prisoners released in 1982 tell how it is used at Evin Prison, the Revolutionary Court headquarters in Tehran:

"The worst thing in Evin is being held blindfold for days on end waiting for someone to tell you why you are there. Some people are left blindfold for days, weeks or months. One man has spent 27 months like this. None of the prisoners appear to know what he is being held for. After 27 months, he sits, largely in total silence nodding his head from one side to the other. Sometimes he just sits knocking his head on the wall. Obviously, they keep people blindfold to add to the fear. But when they suddenly whip off the folds to question you, you are almost blind, the light is painful and you feel dizzy. You can't concentrate on any single thought." Essential to torture is the sense that the interrogator controls everything, even life itself. The pistol cocked at the temple, the meticulous procedure of mock execution by firing-squad, burial alive in a deserted area: each is a means of demonstrating to the victim that the team of torturers has absolute power. "This is nothing but the introductory exercise", a South Korean security agent told a prisoner in 1979 after beating and stamping on him and burning his back with cigarettes. "You can test the limit of your spiritual and physical patience when you are taken to the basement, where there are all kinds of torture instruments from ancient times to the modern age."

"We are six teams trained in Turkey and given full responsibility," a torturer

International law in war and peace explicitly prohibit it. If the authorities claim to rule on the basis of any moral or legal authority whatever, torture should be outlawed; it rends the fabric of society, tearing at any threads of trust or sympathy between the citizens and their rulers.