Afghan prisoners, still more torture

This video is called Canadian Government looked the other way on Afghan torture.

From Al Jazeera:

UN says Afghan prisoners still being tortured

Forms of abuse included hanging prisoners by their wrists and beating them with cables, a new report says.

Last Modified: 20 Jan 2013 18:29

Afghan authorities were still torturing prisoners, such as hanging them by their wrists and beating them with cables, according to a UN report.

More than half of the 635 detainees interviewed had been tortured, according to the report titled Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghan Custody: One Year On, released on Sunday.

The figure is higher than the UN found in its first report in 2011, when 24 percent of transferred detainees were tortured.

In multiple detention centres, Afghan authorities leave detainees hanging from the ceiling by their wrists, beat them with cables and wooden sticks, administer electric shocks, twist their genitals and threaten to shove bottles up their anuses or to kill them, the report said.

The report shows little progress in curbing abuse in Afghan prisons despite the Afghan government’s promise of prison reform.

It also cites instances where Afghan authorities have tried to hide mistreatment from UN monitors.

After the last year’s report, the NATO military alliance temporarily stopped transferring Afghans it had picked up to national authorities until they could set up a system free of abuse.

Though it said the findings were exaggerated, the Afghan government promised after the first report to increase monitoring, but little appears to have changed.

Once NATO forces resumed the transfers and decreased inspections, torture quickly returned to earlier levels, the report said.

‘Allegations untrue’

The report documents what it called a “persistent lack of accountability for perpetrators of torture”, noting that no one has been prosecuted for prisoner abuse since the first report was released.

…

One detainee in the western province of Farah told the UN team: “They laid me on the ground. One of them sat on my feet and another one sat on my head, and the third one took a pipe and started beating me with it.

They were beating me for some time like one hour and were frequently telling me that, ‘You are with Taliban and this is what you deserve.'”

It’s troubling given the amount of international attention and pledges of reform that came after the first report.

“Torture cannot be addressed by training, inspections and directives alone,” said Georgette Gagnon, the head of human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan, explaining that there has been little follow-through by the Afghan government.

In a letter responding to the UN report, General John Allen, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that his staff had written letters to Afghan ministers urging them to investigate more than 80 separate allegations of detainee abuse during the past 18 months.

“To date, Afghan officials have acted in only one instance,” Allen said in the letter.

See also here.

Related articles

• Afghanistan Prison Torture Still Happening, UN Says (huffingtonpost.com)
• UN report condemns increasing use of torture in Afghan jails (guardian.co.uk)