The dark side of humanity

One nasty morning, Joseph Stalin discovered that his favourite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

This joke, which was whispered in Russia in the late Fifties, best describes the foolishness and futility of torture. Although many may think that torture is a medieval topic, they cannot be further from the truth.

Merely two years ago, the United States found it relevant to amend the Constitution to ban "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any prisoner by any agent of the US. Many have even argued that this ban should not be enforced.

Indeed, many accusations of "stress and duress" have arisen during the war on terror, not only in Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The rendition flights, in which six European countries were implicated, are yet another example of states willing to endorse this sort of behaviour.

Torture is defined in the United Nations Convention against Torture as the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering for purposes such as obtaining information or a confession, or punishing, intimidating or coercing someone. The term is applied to those forms of ill-treatment that are particularly severe and deliberate.

There are different types of torture: psychological, physical or forced exercise, pharmacological, psychiatric, and porno torture. The images that leaked from Abu Ghraib of detainees tortured by snarling dogs and wires dangling from their wrists, subjected to severe sexual humiliation, and disoriented by hooding still haunt our minds. What's worse, Amnesty International's medical coordinator, Jim Welsh, claims that victims of torture suffer flashbacks and anxiety for many years.

Amnesty International (AI) estimates that in 2006, 104 countries have tortured or ill-treated people.The fact that the UN has 192 members highlights the severity of the problem. The Universal Decleration of Human Rights prohibits torture and ill treatment, and this applies to all governments. Furthermore, the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment is binding on all 141 states which have signed it. There can be no derogation from the prohibition of torture, which means that torture, no matter the circumstances, may not be excusable.

The countries that use torture may be divided into broad groupings: those which have a low regard for human rights, others which have lax control over security or police forces, and countries where torture happens infrequently, mostly as a result of conflict.

The most common use of torture nowadays would probably be to obtain confessions. A prime example would be the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor who were convicted late last year in Libya and have now been sentenced to death. These had initially confessed to the crimes, and later retracted their statements as these "confessions" were extracted by torture methods in pre-detention settings.

Many allegations of degrading treatment of suspected terrorists from high-ranking officials have been leaked from the "war on terror". Indeed, five years on, there are still reports of inhumane treatment occurring in Guantánamo, where 759 people, some as young as 13, were captured during this "war on terror" and are secretly detained without a fair trial. In fact, no detainees at Guantánamo have been convicted of a criminal offence. This kind of secrecy surrounding detentions is dangerous for the prisoner, distressing for relatives, and detrimental to the rule of law.

Truth, or so we think, which is brought out by questionable methods, is never proof. It has been scientifically proved that when forced to say something, one will be desperate to please. A person being tortured will not say the truth but merely what he thinks will make the torture stop. Besides, proof for trial brought out through methods of torture invalidates the proceedings as it makes the trial unjust.

On the other hand, when torture is used as a means of punishment, it only makes the subject angrier and more determined to seek crueller revenge. No human, no matter what crime he has committed, deserves to be treated less than a human. Many a time I hear, "if that were my family, I would..." and many of us, being human, cannot but agree.

Even so, every human is entitled to a fair trial and then gets the sentence he deserves, but no human should be treated less than he is, for by doing that we are also degrading ourselves to the level of barbarians and animals who take pleasure out of seeing others suffer. Morally we should be above that.

For further information contact media@aimalta.org or visit www.aimalta.org

Ms Abela is PRO of Amnesty International Malta Group