Uninhibited use of torture

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the World Organisation against Torture co-hosted a consultation on Friday on the "Implementation of the UN Convention against Torture". The police in this country, especially in Punjab, routinely employ third degree torture to extract confessions from suspects, leading every once in a while to custodial deaths. It is a deeply disturbing issue having no place in any civilised society. Article 14(2) of the Constitution clearly states "No person shall be subjected to torturer for the purpose of extracting evidence." Pakistan also signed the UN Convention against Torture in 2008, and ratified it in 2010.

Yet this heinous practice has gone on unabated. The victims invariably are members of the poor and powerless sections of society. When in cases of custodial deaths, distraught relatives of the victims and their local sympathizers demand justice, blocking traffic by placing bodies of the dead on the roads, some officers are suspended or transferred. Soon afterwards, it is back to business as usual because the constitutional prohibition of torture is not backed by requisite legislation under which the perpetrators can be held to account. As PPP leader Farhatullah Babar pointed out at the consultative event, lack of political will is responsible for failure to enact legislation to end endemic torture in police stations and lockups. That is obvious from the fact that even though a private member's bill was adopted by Parliament back in 2015 and endorsed by the Ministry of Interior, it didn't come to fruition. The present government has also been promising to introduce its anti-torture bill in Parliament, but has kept deferring it on one pretext or another.

As important as it is to promulgate a law that criminalizes systemic torture, it alone will not solve the problem unless the reasons underlying the police behaviour are effectively addressed. One, of course, is the infamous 'police culture' which is designed to serve the elites, and regards ordinary people as lesser beings with no human rights. What is needed is a complete overhaul of police training so that they learn to treat all citizens with a sense of common decency. Second, since the only investigation method they seem to know is infliction of physical pain on suspects, they need to be equipped with modern investigative techniques and wherewithal. However, as noted earlier, those who have the authority to bring an end to the use of torture by law enforcement agencies have little interest in either making the necessary law or to institute the promised police reforms. Things can change for the better only if civil society members keep putting pressure on the government as well as major opposition parties to do all that is necessary to effectively prohibit torture as a standard police practice.