SA's image battered by torture - 2007
DEC.10 2997 -- Brutal torture of people in police and military custody has raised major global concerns about South Africa's ability to implement its legal international and national human rights obligations. Amnesty International (AI), the premier international human rights organisation, says it continues to receive corroborated evidence of abuses that include the use of electric shocks, suffocation, forced painful postures, suspension from moving vehicles and helicopters, and severe and prolonged beatings.
· "There are clusters of police stations around the country where repeated incidences of torture are reported," says Mary Rayner, a researcher for Amnesty International's Africa programme in London. "As recently as September, we received a report that the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit acts with impunity. There are at least 20 to 30 severe cases of torture a year that are reported, but there are many more incidents that are not reported."
· Rayner, part of an AI delegation who visited South Africa in October to investigate torture, says there appears to be a lack of seriousness on the part of authorities in dealing with this matter. "This failure, combined with the deficient resources for monitoring bodies like the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), contribute to the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators.
Duxita Mistry, senior researcher for the Institute for Human Rights and Criminal Justice Studies, said: "The ICD is under-resourced, and doesn't have the capacity to monitor torture. They are overwhelmed just by deaths in police custody, they can't even cope with that. "Bodies like the civilian Secretariat for Safety and Security are also an oversight mechanism, but they are barely visible and have really fizzled out. They don't have enough investigators, their budgets are too small, and they don't have enough money for research or to have an office in every province. "The community policing forums would have been another vehicle to monitor police brutality and torture but the public seems to have lost interest in them," Mistry adds. Gareth Newham, a criminal-justice policy researcher for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, agrees with AI's concerns about human rights abuses. "The torture policy that is in place at the moment is very bureaucratic," he says, "and what tends to happen is that police opt to torture suspects outside of the station's precincts. You find station commanders who aren't too concerned about complaints of police torture or brutality." Newham suggests that the most effective way to fight abuses would be to have an internal mechanism, such as a central database, in place where individuals or units who have a high number of complaints are investigated.
Source Article: http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2008/11/sa-police-brutality-and-criminality.html
