Maravi

Beating of suspects, prisoners must end

Beating of suspects, prisoners must end
By Editor
Tuesday May 20, 2008 [04:00]

The torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or beating of suspects and prisoners to death should be unthinkable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948) states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. We should not allow or condone our police cells and prisons to be pervaded by a culture of sadistic and malicious violence.

Reports of suspects and prisoners being killed by law enforcement officers or prison warders are increasing. As Human Rights Commission director Enoch Mulembe has observed, we are still battling as a nation with increasing numbers of torture and inhuman treatment of suspects.

On Sunday a prison warder was arrested in Mwinilunga for beating a prisoner to death. And we recently carried a story of two police officers in Mumbwa who were arrested for beating a suspect to death. This should not be condoned because every human being deserves to be given fair treatment regardless of them being prisoners or suspects.

We cannot fight crime and criminals using similar barbaric methods. If we do so, we should not consider ourselves to be better than those criminals we have put in our prisons or those who we suspect of having committed crimes and have been locked up in our police cells. If we do so, we should equally consider ourselves to be criminals who should be arrested, locked up, prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison.

Crime cannot be fought through crime. It cannot be fought in an inhuman manner. If this happens, those fighting crime – our law enforcement officers – will not be different from the criminals they are fighting. They will equally be criminals.
The rights of every human being must be upheld.

We cannot overlook the fact that most men and women who work in our prisons and police stations are decent professionals who have never physically abused or intentionally degraded an inmate or detainee. But the absence of leadership, oversight and external scrutiny can create a climate in which abuses will occur. Abusive officers do not operate in a vacuum.

A culture of brutality has developed, and seems to be taking root, in which law enforcement officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence. In such situations, senior officers have failed to communicate unequivocally, through training, staff supervision, investigations and discipline, that abuse will not be tolerated.

The failures of senior officers are compounded by the absence of external scrutiny. Prisons and police cells are closed institutions from which the press, human rights groups and members of the public are typically excluded. Independent expert inspections yielding public findings are rare, and usually occur only after the situation has become very bad.

Perhaps if photos or video tapes of abuse in our prisons and police cells were to circulate publicly, kind, sensitive and humane Zambians would be galvanised to protest such treatment. In the abscence of such graphic and unavoidable evidence, it is all too likely that abuse will continue to be part of many of our prisons and police cells.

Even detained children and youths are not immune from such brutality and abuse. They too are kicked, beaten, punched and mistreated in all sorts of ways.

Let us not forget that even if these people have committed serious crimes, they are still human beings, they are still our brothers and sisters deserving humane treatment. Our laws do not allow such abuses in any way.

Why? This is simply because our laws recognise human beings as human beings, and not as animals, regardless of their wrongs. Even those human beings who behave like ‘animals’, ‘wild beasts’, are still human beings and deserve to be treated as such. Their animal or wild beast behaviour does not take away their being human and their right to be treated as human beings. This is the way our law stands.

And probably this explains why we only have prisons for human beings and not for animals – even if the conditions in our prisons and police cells sometimes are worse than those of places where we keep animals.

For these reasons, imprisonment or detention of any sort should never be allowed to reduce the status of a human being to that of an animal. And as such they should always be treated as human beings who have committed a crime; and not as animals.
The purpose of a prison sentence is to ultimately protect society against crime and not to expose the prisoner to abuse or possible death at the hands of prison warders.

We therefore call for stiff punishment of prison and police officers who abuse or beat prisoners and detainees to death. Under no circumstances should we allow our law enforcement officers to effect summary executions of their prisoners or suspects. Corporal punishment can only be handed out by our courts of law and not our prison warders or police officers.

There is need to make our prison and police officers accountable for such deaths. Such practices must be brought to an end. Beating of prisoners or suspects, torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices should be unthinkable in our country.
Our prisons and police cells are not torture chambers.

Labels: POLICE BRUTALITY

posted by MrK @ 3:51 AM