UN officials say torture is “common practice” in SriLanka
Juan E. Mendez, the UN’s top official on torture and alternative cruel, inhuman treatment and punishment, and Monica Pinto, the UN special recorder on the independence of judges and lawyers, released their findings at a Colombo press conference on could seven.
The reports followed a nine-day visit to SriLanka, during that the world organization representatives met with SriLankan government officers, interviewed torture victims and visited prisons and detention centres. The world organization rapporteurs can gift full reports to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in March and Gregorian calendar month next year, respectively.
Mendez told the press that based on testimonies he took from victims and current detainees “torture may be a common apply inflicted within the course of each regular criminal and national security-related investigations...
“Severe forms of torture still be used, although most likely less ofttimes [since the finish of the war], while each previous and new cases of torture continue to be enclosed by total freedom,” he said.
Mendez noted that between 16,000 and 22,000 people had gone missing throughout the war and its aftermath, describing the disappearances as the “torture of the foremost horrifying kind.”
The interim reports revealed that:
* Torture and other forms of physical and mental coercion area unit a “routine technique of work” by police investigators to get confessions. The abuse can embody punches, slapping and blows with objects, such as batons or cricket bats, as well as suspending handcuffed prisoners for hours, asphyxiation using plastic baggage drenched in fuel, hanging people top side down, applying chili powder to face and therefore the eyes. Interrogators also sexually desecrated detainees, including reproductive organ accidental injury or the application of chili paste and onions.
* Confessions obtained under torture area unit used as proof against victims.
* The Prevention of act of terrorism Act (PTA) has been used for discretional arrests and detention while not trial for prolonged periods of up to eighteen months. Under the PTA, “magistrates essentially rubber-stamp detention orders created by the government Branch and don't discuss either conditions of detention or potential abuse in interrogation.”
* Police officers are given wide powers to habitually arrest folks, with no judicial oversight of police methods.
* No clear procedures to inform detainees that they need to have access to a lawyer as shortly as they're in remission.
* Detainees are command uncommunicative to stop revelation of wherever they're confined.
* There is seriously deficient prison infrastructure and severe overcrowding. This included, “acute lack of adequate sleeping accommodation, extreme heat and insufficient ventilation,” as well as limited access to medical treatment.
Mendez reported that the Vavuniya remand jail command one hundred seventy prisoners in less than one hundred sq. meters, or 0.6 metres per person. Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) jails, he said, lacked ventilation and had only restricted access to daylight. “Some inmates spend regarding twelve hours a day within the dark.”
Mendez and Pinto same there area unit long delays of trial in all cases, including those in remission for “armed conflict” or for political reasons, with some detained for 15 years while not trial.
While the interim reports offer a restricted account of the current human rights violations, the revelations are a inculpatory refutation of claims by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe that their government defends democratic rights and reveal the hypocrisy of the USA, and the UN itself.
Following the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government’s alignment with Washington’s foreign policy aims and its “pivot” to Asia, senior US officers, including Secretary of State John Kerry, began hailing Sri Lanka as a defender of basic rights. Last month, US ambassador to world organization Samantha Power declared that since January 2015 Sri Lanka has become a “global champion of human rights and democratic answerableness.”
These claims are blatant lies. Sirisena became the Sri Lankan president in January 2015, following a Washington instigated regime-change operation. The US confiscated on human right violations by former President Mahinda Rajapakse throughout the war against Tigers as a weapon to isolate him and rally sections of the Sri Lankan ruling elite and higher socio-economic class to oust him.
The US had turned a blind eye as the Rajapakse government damaged on basic democratic rights, imprisoned its opponents and killed thousands of Tamil civilians throughout the last months of the war.
Washington only began criticising these crimes once China emerged as the main provider of military hardware and finances to Colombo. In the UN, the US pushed through a resolution line for associate international inquiry into Sri Lankan war crimes.
These “concerns” had nothing to do with defending human rights however were to pressure Colombo into lining up with Washington’s “pivot to Asia,” a military agenda to encircle China.
After Sirisena was elevated into the presidency, SriLankan foreign policy shifted in favour of Washington and India, the US’s strategic partner in the region.
Last August the US born its calls for a world inquiry into countryn war crimes and helped secure the passage of a resolution within the UNHRC permitting SriLanka to carry a questionable domestic inquiry. These manoeuvres were yet another demonstration of however USA imperialism uses “human rights” to advance its strategic interests.
Responding to the UN rapporteurs’ interim reports, SriLankan Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne told the media that the cabinet had mentioned the claims and would investigate the revelations. This, of course, will be another hiding.
The military-police apparatus and inhibitory ways developed throughout the civil war against staff and poor, Tamil, Sinhala and Muslims alike, will be maintained. Mired in economic crisis, the government is committed to implementing the sharp austerity measures demanded by the International fund and can progressively use these ways to suppress the inevitable eruption of mass opposition by staff and therefore the poor.
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