Torture beyond torture: The need for a broader definition

By: OKIYA OMTATAH OKOITI of the EAiF Staff
Published July 1, 2009

At the invitation of the Coast Human Rights Network (C-HURINET), Dr. Patrick Otieno Lumumba and myself joined residents of Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, to mark this year’s United Nations International Day in support of victims of torture.

But we were here not to address torture in the traditional manner where attention focuses on the inhuman treatment of prisoners by state agents as well as by non state actors. We were here to condemn any activities that diminish the ability of individuals to enjoy a good quality life. Hence, we led a procession through the city centre and made specific demands on the Government.

We asked the government to reign in rogue millers who have inflated the price of maize floor (the local staple) way beyond the reach of many Kenyans. As a result many Kenyans are starving yet the government has allowed the millers to import the maize duty free as an emergency measure to deal with the acute food shortage in the country. Mombasa residents want the government to impose price controls on all basic commodities.

The residents also want the government’s Water Department to supply water and not air in their pipes. The pipes have been dry for months now yet the people continue to be billed for water. To make matters worse, there is a cholera outbreak in Mombasa and if no action is taken to supply clean water the problem might morph into an epidemic.

Hawkers in the coastal city are also demanding that the authorities stop harassing them, especially at this time when there are no formal jobs to absorb them. The police have been arresting and arraigning them in court on trumped up charges. And the courts impose on them heavy fines if they plead guilty, or slap on them impossible bail terms if they uphold their innocence. A classic case is where Mombasa’s chief magistrate recently slammed a Kshs. 1 million cash bond and a surety of similar amount on a hawker who pleaded not guilty. For someone who earns less than Kshs. 100 a day such bail terms amount to torture.

The hawkers want the government to come up with well thought out mechanisms that will allow them to go about earning their bread in peace.

Another demand was that the Kenya government immediately rescinds it decision to be receiving and prosecuting Somali pirates caught in the high seas by international naval forces. The pirates pose a major security risk to the locals, especially to the Shimo la Tewa prison inmates where they are jailed. Being international criminals, the pirates should be tried at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Finally, the residents were standing up with the local policemen and women who had been complaining to them about harassment by their boss, Mr. Kin’ori Mwangi, the provincial police officer. They accuse the immensely wealthy police boss of being in the pay of criminal gangs, including drug barons who have turned the coastal city into a most notorious drugs centre in the country. The people wanted Mr. Mwangi immediately fired from the police force and be prosecuted for abuse of office.

Later that day, Mr. Mwangi was moved to Western Province in the same capacity in a reshuffle that affected senior police officers countrywide. Though the people celebrated his departure, they were saddened that he had not been fired and arrested, but that he had been deployed to harass Kenyans in Western Province.

June 26 is observed annually worldwide to give us the chance to stand united and voice our opinion against torture, a cruel violation of human rights. On that day we remind ourselves that torture is not only unacceptable – it is also a crime.

The decision to annually observe the UN International Day in support of victims of torture was taken by the UN General Assembly in 1997, following a proposal by Denmark, which is home to the world-renowned International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.

A decade earlier, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture had came into force. It was an important step in the process of globalizing human rights and acknowledging that torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment should be universally illegal.

The United Nations appeals to all governments and members of civil society to take action to defeat torture and torturers everywhere. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 categorically proclaims that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Torture is one of the most profound human rights abuses, taking a terrible toll on millions of individuals and their families. But the war against it is limited by the very narrow way the UN has defined torture down and miniaturized it in ways that the only thing that really winds up being torture is physical pain directly inflicted on someone.

Ideally, blows to the soles of the feet, suffocation in water, burns, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, shaking and beating, and other tools that are commonly used by torturers to break down an individual’s personality should not be the only ones condemned.

Seeing your child miss school or die because the International Monetary Fund/World Bank policies or skewed international trade and aid instruments, have taken away the government’s capacity to provide education and health services, is extreme torture.

Time has come for Africans, and indeed the global South in general, to demand that the international community must come up with a broader understanding of torture that takes cognisance of the cruel, inhumane and degrading atrocities playing out on the continent, and in the global South.

To help Africa domesticate the fight against it, torture should deliberately be defined to include mass poverty, and the torturers must include the many Northern organisations that prefer charity to justice, and the Northern corporations and institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, whose policies have created dependent economies in the global South.

The Convention Against Torture must be informed by assumptions that deliberately and strongly suggest that it was written for all people, and not just for Western societies that have already met most of their basics. As such, torture should not only refer to deliberate excesses of or, in addition to state-sponsored torture, individuals or groups motivated to inflict pain on others for similar reasons to those of a state or for the sadistic gratification of the torturer. Torture must be broadly defined to include all conditions that make the lives of human beings unbearable, and those behind the ravaging poverty industry in the global South must be condemned as torturers.

Related Posts

Tags: Kenya, mombasa, torture