Beneficiaries include human rights defenders, persons deprived of liberty, children and adolescents, refugees and migrants, victims of enforced disappearance, indigenous peoples, victims of sexual and gender-based violence and LGBTI persons, among others. To witness how rehabilitation services help torture survivors to heal, watch the UN Torture Fund trailer, featuring interviews with beneficiary organizations, survivors and trustees.
Today, the Convention has been ratified by countries. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. In , the international community condemned torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.
During the s and s, progress was made both in the development of legal standards and instruments and in enforcement of the prohibition of torture. The United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture was established by the General Assembly in to fund organizations providing assistance to victims of torture and their families. Its implementation by States parties is monitored by a body of independent experts, the Committee against Torture.
The first Special Rapporteur on torture , an independent expert mandated to report on the situation of torture in the world, was appointed by the Commission on Human Rights in During the same period, the General Assembly adopted resolutions in which it highlighted the role of health personnel in protecting prisoners and detainees against torture and established general principles for the treatment of detained persons.
Despite the commitments made by the government to adhere to the Optional Protocol of the Convention against Torture, much work is needed to be done to eradicate the practice.
For decades, President Isaias Afewerki has led Eritrea with an iron fist. There is no legislature, no non-governmental organisations or media outlets or even a judiciary. There is a harsh system of conscription which sees every Eritrean serve for an indefinite period often lasting around 10 years. Whilst in service, Eritreans are subjected to treatment which has been characterised as enslavement and attempts to avoid national service has led to imprisonment and torture. We have evidence that women and men exercising their rights to participate in political or human rights activism have frequently been detained and tortured by the state to silence any political opposition.
Read more about torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was woken from sleep for the purpose of the rape and taken out of the room she was detained in. She thinks that three different soldiers were involved and she would be raped by two of them at any one time.
She was pushed onto her knees and raped vaginally and anally. She was also raped orally. There have been a variety of human rights abuses permitted by the former Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir over his year rule. In particular, we have evidence of torture committed from after the Darfuri war under the premise of non-Arab ethnic cleansing. More recently, protests in early calling for Omar al-Bashir to step down led to a new torrent of oppression with government forces detaining, torturing, and killing scores of civilians.
Since then, al-Bashir relinquished power and the military council formed a transitional government with the main opposition coalition. Where I lived in Sudan young boys like me would be forced into the army, they made you kill your own family. The boys in my village refused so the army took us. I was burnt, beaten, locked up on my own. I still have the scars. I was just crying for my mum every day.
For years, there has been authoritarian rule in Ethiopia where torture has been a staple of the government. The absurd idea that torture could result in intelligence so quickly that it would stop a terrorist plot comes from the fictional world of films and television shows. In fact, seasoned interrogators such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis forcefully assert that accurate information comes from sophisticated questioning techniques, not torture. Torture is psychological as well as physical.
Torturers often focus on ways of inflicting grave pain that never leave a mark on the flesh: forced nakedness and sexual humiliation, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, sensory deprivation and mock executions are among some of the horrific methods used to inflict torment. From a medical and psychological perspective , these abuses constitute torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Torture is used to control communities and families. When one person is taken and tortured, the family learns immediately to be afraid, to be silent. When a second person is tortured, the community quickly gets the message: you must do whatever the perpetrators want. Torture takes control swiftly. Torture creates such a climate of fear and insecurity that it fractures communities, silences dissent and suppresses civic engagement.
The torture of families in their homes is heinous and devastating. For three decades, survivors have been describing torture scenarios to CVT that have nothing to do with interrogations, only with instilling terror, inflicting pain, enacting revenge and enforcing forms of slavery. Men, women and children are all affected; in fact, over half of the survivors CVT cares for are women or girls.
Even children are tortured. Torture methods used on victims can be of both physical and psychological nature, such as prolonged solitary confinement or sleep deprivation. Both psychological and physical torture complement each other causing severe pain to people who were affected by it.
Infliction of physical torture is in most cases reflected in psychological consequences. Applying torture methods of these types on someone can directly damage their memory and cause an extreme psychological trauma. For example, if affected by one of these methods, victims may become so mentally broken that they might not even remember simple things such as their home address.
Similarly, victims who are deprived of sleep may become confused and disoriented, which can cause them to convince themselves in things interrogators are suggesting them and, in this way, produce false information. However, infliction of torture methods does not cause psychological trauma only to victims, but also to the torturers. Most often, state authorities and politicians who support torture are not the ones who inflict it personally.
They leave to others to enforce their policies and apply torture methods, which affects them on a psychological level by being rooted deeply within their brain circuit. This means that both victims and perpetrators face a range of devastating psychological consequences. The use of torture physically destroys people. Torture methods, such as sham executions, rape, sexual assaults, humiliation and sleep deprivation often leave physical consequences on affected persons such as chronic pain in certain parts of body and inability to lead a healthy and prolonged lifestyle.
For this reason, people who had been affected by torture should have access to redress such as medical care, reintegration into society, rehabilitation and counseling.
When states and governments use torture to achieve their goals, they often see it as necessary to provide some type of justification for its implementation. Governments and politicians must find ways to excuse and explain the use of torture, while those who publicly advocate for it must find arguments that would justify torture as a practice that is globally and universally regarded as immoral and condemned.
The prohibition of torture is enshrined in many conventions and declarations within the international human rights and humanitarian law. Similarly, it was established by the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols that serious violations of international humanitarian law, including torture and other inhuman treatment, constitute war crimes in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
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