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	Ugandan rebels displace thousands in DR Congo, Sudan by United Nations News   Dec 2009   In a 10-month rampage of killings, rape and mutilation in neighbouring countries that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the rebel Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has killed some 1,300 civilians, abducted 1,400 more, including hundreds of children and women, and displaced nearly 300,000 others, the United Nations reported today.   The dozens of attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and southern Sudan by the LRA, notorious for two decades of murderous rampages in its homeland, were detailed in two joint reports by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC) and the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) respectively, both calling for international action to help halt the slaughter and bring those accountable to trial.   “The brutality employed during the attacks was consistent, deliberate and egregious,” the report on Sudan said, stressing that machetes, axes, knives and hoes were often the preferred weapon and even babies were killed. It cited gruesome witness accounts, including that of a man who “reported discovering the mutilated body of a fellow villager. The villager’s leg had been chopped off, his jaws had been dislocated and his teeth had been pulled out,” it added.   In DRC, where the LRA killed at least 1,200 people, abducted 1,400 and displaced some 230,000 others, dozens of attacks on towns and villages in Orientale province from September 2008 to June 2009, involved mutilations, torture and multiple rapes. Women and girls were often raped before being killed, and many of those who were abducted “were forced to marry LRA members, subjected to sexual slavery, or both,” the report on the DRC said.   People who helped bury the dead in the town of Batande testified to UN human rights staff that a dozen women had been found “their hands tied, clothes torn and legs apart.” In the most devastating wave of synchronized attacks over a period of 24 hours on Christmas Day 2008, in two clusters of locations some 400 kilometres apart, two groups of between 100 and 150 LRA fighters killed at least 477 civilians and abducted hundreds of others.   The LRA was formed in the late 1980s in Uganda and for over 15 years its attacks were mainly directed against Ugandan civilians and security forces, which in 2002 dislodged the rebels, who then exported their rampage to Uganda’s neighbours. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for LRA Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Kony, and other senior officers on 33 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes.   The Christmas massacre followed a MONUC-supported joint military involving the Congolese army (FARDC), Ugandan and Sudanese troops, and the report noted that the terror inflicted by the LRA was compounded by FARDC troops. “Displaced persons were also subjected to harassment, extortion, rape and summary executions committed by the Congolese security forces,” it said, adding that camps sheltering displaced people were also attacked by the LRA, causing further displacement.   The report urges the Congolese Government and its foreign military allies to “conduct a realistic assessment of their capacities to defend and protect civilian populations” and, with assistance from the international community, to implement “a military operation that takes into account the duty to protect civilians.”   It calls on the world community to “assist the DRC to establish a vetting system to improve the quality of its security forces and their ability to protect civilians” and to “cooperate with the ICC in investigating, arresting, and transferring all LRA leaders accused of international crimes.”   According to the report on Sudan, covering the period between December 2008 and March this year, at least 81 civilians were killed, with many others injured, mutilated, raped and abducted, including women and at least 18 children forced to work as child soldiers, sex slaves, porters and spies.   Villages were pillaged, often partly or entirely destroyed, and than 38,000 people were reported to have been displaced within southern Sudan’s Western and Central Equatoria states, near the border with the DRC. LRA groups entered southern Sudan and neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), after December’s joint offensive against them in DRC, and a further 17,000 people fled into Sudan.   In southern Sudan, numerous witnesses described to UN investigators how the LRA is operating in groups of between five and 20 individuals armed with “bladed weapons” – including machetes, axes, bayonets, knives, hoes, clubs and spears – as well as AK–47 automatic rifles and machine guns.   “In many attacks, they preferred the use of bladed weapons over firearms,” the report said, citing the example of attacks on two villages where “attackers used pangas [machetes], axes, bayonets, hoes and knives on the majority of the victims. They reserved their firearms for those who attempted to escape.”   The LRA attackers “targeted civilians, killing many and causing serious injury without regard for sex, age or ethnicity,” it added, noting that even babies were killed.   The report calls on the international community, including regional governments, to cooperate with the ICC to search for, arrest and hand over the accused LRA leaders. It recommends that UNMIS exercise its protection of civilians mandate to prevent further loss of life and continue monitoring the situation. It also calls on the Government of Southern Sudan to take steps to tackle LRA crimes, as well as to devote adequate resources to ensure effective judicial processes to bring perpetrators to justice.
	Torture still rife 25 years after adoption of treaty banning it, UN experts warn by UN Committee against Torture   10 December 2009   Although 146 States of the 192 Member States of the United Nations ratified or acceded to the international convention outlawing torture, the practice is still rife worldwide 25 years after the treaty’s adoption, the UN Committee against Torture warned today.   Among the main obstacles, Committee Chairperson Claudio Grossman cited the refusal to adopt a clear definition of torture, to criminalize torture and establish adequate penalties, failure to investigate alleged torture, and impunity for perpetrators of acts of torture.   “We cannot say that torture has decreased… full implementation is far from being achieved,” he said on the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.   He also drew attention also to the expulsion, return and extradition of persons to States where there are substantial grounds for believing that they are in danger of being tortured, and so-called ‘rendition’ of suspects to countries that continue to use torture as a means of investigation and interrogation.   “I call upon all Members States of the United Nations to ratify or accede to the Convention, and upon all States parties to the Convention to fully implement the Convention’s provisions and the Committee’s recommendations, to withdraw their reservations to the Convention, and to report to the Committee on the measures they have undertaken to prevent torture and ill-treatment,” he declared.   “Only then will we move closer to achieving the better world imagined 25 years ago,” he said, adding that the Convention’s adoption “was an important act to imagine and help shape the world in which we want to live – one which, unfortunately, still remains unrealized.”   Nov. 2009   The time had come to adopt a United Nations convention on rights of detainees, Manfred Nowak, Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, told correspondents at Headquarters today. “In so many countries”, he said, “States are not living up to their obligations to respect the basic dignity of human beings in detention.”   Mr. Nowak was speaking following the presentation of his fifth annual report to the UN General Assembly. In each of his reports, Mr. Nowak said, he had focused on different aspects of torture in various contexts.   This time, however, he focused on abusive conditions of detention in general, on the “forgotten prisoners”, whether they were accused persons in pre-trial detention, convicted prisoners, aliens awaiting deportation or minors locked up for various reasons.   Unacceptable detention conditions occurred not only in developing countries, but also in the industrialized ones, in the cases, for example, of illegal immigrants awaiting hearings. The same walls that kept prisoners inside could also keep societal scrutiny out, he noted.   He believed, in fact, that a majority of the 10 million persons deprived of liberty worldwide were living in unacceptable conditions. In many countries, in fact, the authorities did not even feel responsible to provide food, shifting that responsibility to families.   In those situations, he said, the poorest and those without families were at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, having to provide services to others in exchange for food. Saying health and sanitary services were often non-existent, he described appalling conditions in which wounds were untreated and human waste was either lived in or collected in plastic containers.   Children of shockingly low ages were often found in pre-trial detention, and were the most vulnerable to corporal punishment, inter-prisoner violence and sexual abuse, he said, stressing that children should be detained only as a last resort and only for the shortest possible periods.   Asked about the United States detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, he said he was still extremely encouraged by President Barack Obama’s executive orders towards closing the facility in the first days of his administration, even though there were serious problems in finding countries to place the detainees, and it was doubtful that the January deadline could be met.   He was, therefore, calling on other countries to accept the detainees, who must not be forced to return to countries of origin where they might be subject to abuse. He was encouraged that there were certain European countries and others that were willing to take detainees, but there remained some 40 to 50 who had not been placed.   In regard to the Goldstone Report on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, he said that he was not involved in it, but was able to comment that the preventive detention of young boys described in it might defy human rights norms. He voiced disappointment, however, that the Human Rights Council had not looked at possible abuses by both sides alleged in the Report.   Asked about the application of international human rights law in cases involving accused terrorists in the United States and other countries, he said that international treaties had strong legal status in a particular country when duly ratified by that country, and the United States Supreme Court, as well as the Obama Administration, had come a long way in seeing the situation in that light.   He maintained that much still needed to be done in that area, however, as shown by the lack of application of article 14 of the Convention against Torture regarding reparations to victims. He said invoking the State Secrecy privilege to prevent litigation in those cases was wrong.   In reply to inquiries about the Arab world, he said there was widespread evidence of torture in many countries, but most of them had not invited him, despite numerous requests. The exception was Jordan, where he did not find systematic torture, though he reported the use of torture in the intelligence and investigative services, including beatings and suspension for long periods by hands tied behind the back. The worst prison, where there were regular heavy beatings, was closed on his recommendation, he said. There were currently interviews being conducted with persons who had been kept in secret detention in quite a number of countries, but the ongoing investigation could not be discussed.   Asked about some of the worst prison conditions in his latest report, he recalled the unbearable conditions in the metal containers of Liberdad prison in Uruguay and the torture room in a detention centre in Lagos, Nigeria, where more than a hundred people, including women and children, were crammed together and tortured in front of each other.   In those instances, he said, the facilities were closed down after he brought the conditions to the attention of high officials, but, in other cases, such as that of bare concrete cells in Equatorial Guinea that lacked toilets and food, the Government completely rejected his report with the excuse that he spoke to the sole member of the opposition party in the legislature.   In Kazakhstan, he said he found three-year-old abandoned street children detained with teenagers accused of crimes, but he added that the country was not the worst offender in that area; often unaccompanied minors who had illegally entered developed countries were detained pending deportation. He also affirmed that the mixing of pre-trial detainees and sentenced prisoners often occurred and was a violation of human rights law.   He said that Cuba had publicly invited him to visit at the Human Rights Council during its Universal Periodic Review. Arrangements had not yet been agreed upon, but he was confident it would take place in 2010. He had not been invited to Iran despite many requests; he had also received “quite a high number of credible allegations” of torture after the elections. He communicated those to the Government, but had not yet gotten a response.   Finally, in regard to Sri Lanka, he said he had visited the country before this year’s final action against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and had found many allegations of torture against Tamils. He would not comment on allegations of abuses after the latest military action, but he said he regard them as serious. Visit the related web page
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