The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago. The report subjected a major country, the USA, to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including: • Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners • Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release • Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons • Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions • Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution • Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many of them demonstrably innocent or unfairly tried • Widespread use of solitary confinement, considered a form of torture, at all levels of the prison system • Severe abuse of juveniles, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups both in police custody and in prisons • Maintaining a regime of police violence, particularly against young men from racial and ethnic minorities, and refusing to restrain or punish police who kill, wound or torture Read More: globalresearch.ca/un-report-documents-torture-police-violence-in-us/5416982
Posted on: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 06:11:01 +0000
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