Govt centre under fire

Children at the gate of the Prey Speu social affairs centre earlier this week in Phnom Penh's Dangkor district. (Photo by: Heng Chivoan)

Thursday, 07 July 2011
James O'Toole and Vong Sokheng

“We were only at the centre for one day, but we found out that it is not a good place to live”

VORN Kandop, 43, was arrested on Monday while begging in the capital’s O’Russei market. Along with his wife and five-year-old son, he was taken one day later to the Prey Speu social affairs centre.

Most detainees are held at the notorious Dangkor district facility for at least three months. Vorn Kandop and his family were able to leave the centre yesterday with the help of local rights groups, and afterwards, he recognised their good fortune.

“We were told that we would be beaten if we tried to escape from the centre, and we saw people being beaten,” he said.

Until yesterday, Vorn Kandop’s son was just one of roughly 20 children housed at Prey Speu, a government-run facility established in 2003 that has come under renewed criticism following a report from the United Nations committee on child rights made public last week. That report calls for the release of all children in the Kingdom being held in “arbitrary detention”, yet activists fear that the entrenched patterns of abuse at Prey Speu show no sign of fading any time soon.

Cambodian detention centres 'torturing kids'

Authorities are accused of taking children off the streets and delivering them to detention centres. (AFP : Rob Elliott)

Tuesday, February 02, 2010
By Conor Duffy in Bangkok for PM
ABC News (Australia)

Audio: Cambodian authorities accused of torturing prisoners (PM)

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a scathing report accusing Cambodian authorities of locking up and torturing thousands of people a year in drug detention centres.

The human rights group says many of the detainees are children and that they suffer abuses such as rape and electric shocks.

HRW has also accused UNICEF of involvement in one of the detention centres, saying one of the organisation's vehicles has been used to transport children to the drug treatment centre.

HRW says there are 11 drug detention centres scattered across Cambodia and that more than 2,000 people are detained inside each year.

The organisation has been trying to peer inside the jail cells for more than a year and has now released a detailed report.

NRW New York-based director Joe Amon says the group has spoken with more than 50 recently released detainees who suffered violence he describes as sadistic.

"We found a pretty uniform set of abuses being reported across all of the centres where we talked to people," he said.

"People reported being beaten, being whipped with electrical cables. There were reports of being raped or witnessing other rapes and also the use of electric shock."

Mr Amon says many of those imprisoned are children and that the centres breach Cambodian and international law.

"There were two different ways in which people ended up in the centres. One was through street sweeps, where the police would detain people and bring them to the centres and drop them off," he said.

"In those cases there was no formal charge, there was no lawyer, there was no judge, there was no process for appeal.

"And the second main way was through family members who would pay the police to arrest their loved ones, their children or spouses or brothers."

UNICEF implicated

UNICEF has been working closely with the Cambodian government at one of the detention centres.

A Cambodian newspaper has published a photograph which it says shows a UNICEF van being used to transport illegally detained children to a detention centre.

Mr Amon has called on UNICEF to denounce the centres.

"The van very clearly says 'provided with the support of UNICEF and the European Union' and there was another picture also which wasn't published, but which I saw that said 'in support of child friendly justice'," he said.

"The idea that these centres are child friendly justice is really outrageous. These centres are abusive and they're torturing kids."

A European Union spokesman said he was concerned at any use of EU assets in illegal activities and has called for an immediate investigation.

Richard Bridle, the UNICEF representative in Cambodia, says his organisation has put questions to the Cambodian Social Justice Ministry over the use of the van.

"We are also concerned if a vehicle was provided partly with UNICEF funding," he said.

"The main source of funding actually came from the European Union delegation here, so the vehicle doesn't belong to us, it belongs to the government; we're looking into the terms in which it was transferred."

However Mr Bridle has resisted the calls from HRW to close the prisons down because he says it would lead to children being locked up in adult prisons.

"What would worry me about shutting down this centre is that then the only alternative that's left is closed detention and we have seen period round-ups by the police of street children," he said.

Mr Bridle told ABC Radio's PM that he would not be surprised if abuses were occurring in the drug detention centres, but that HRW's call to close the centres down immediately is simplistic.

"I understand where Human Rights Watch is coming from. I understand it is an advocacy organisation and that from our point of view it tends to see things in black and white," he said.

"We have much more difficult calls to make here with regards to the best interest of all children who come into conflict with the law."

Similar drug detention centres exist in many other Asian countries and it may be an argument that plays out across the region.

Cambodia to inspect its detention centers

February 04, 2009
By Lao Mong Hay
UPI Asia.com

Column: Rule by Fear

Hong Kong, China — A recent survey shows that over a quarter of the Cambodian population had been subject to torture in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge regime. In the early 1990s Cambodia set out to prevent the repeat of this experience and adhere to the U.N. Convention against Torture and, in 2007, to the Optional Protocol to this convention or OPCAT.

However, Cambodia failed to honor its obligations under OPCAT and has been unable to create a national preventive mechanism within 12 months following its ratification of the protocol. The mechanism's main mandate is to visit places of detention and make recommendations to the relevant authorities to ensure respect for the fundamental rights of persons detained in those places.

Now, in a recent workshop in Phnom Penh on the implantation of OPCAT, the Cambodian government has pledged to put it in place in the next two years. In the same workshop, the prosecutor general of the Court of Appeal announced that he would soon exercise his power of inspection of prisons and police stations as conferred upon him and prosecutors of the Court of First Instance by a recently enacted code of criminal procedure. One of the aims of this inspection is to prevent torture or ill treatment of detainees.

Torture and other ill treatment are still used by the police to extract confessions not only to the alleged crime for which a suspect has been arrested but also to his previous crimes. Courts prefer to ignore claims of such treatment by accused persons to avoid the trouble of rejecting their statement to the police, ordering new investigations, and prosecuting the police officer(s) allegedly involved in the act.

Regarding the inspection of places of detention, it is not yet known what kind of methodology the prosecutor general will use to ascertain whether torture or other ill treatment is involved. Nor is it certain whether he will get full cooperation from the concerned officers although he has full disciplinary power over them. Besides, it is difficult to ensure that suspects detained in police cells or inmates in prisons who come forth with allegations of such acts will not suffer any retaliation after he departs following the inspection.

There are also serious doubts about his ability and that of prosecutors of the Court of First Instance to conduct thorough inspections of all police stations and prisons across the country as there are not many prosecutors and not all are allocated adequate resources for their prosecution task, let alone a particular inspection of a detention center.

However, these difficulties are a challenge to them in discharging their constitutional duties as members of the judiciary to protect the rights of Cambodians deprived of their liberty and held in detention centers.

Nevertheless, such inspections of places of detention should be welcomed and judicial officers should be unreservedly supported when exercising their authority. They should be allocated adequate resources for the task and given technical assistance to develop methodologies and other measures to ensure effective inspections to prevent torture and ill treatment of detainees. This will ensure respect for their fundamental rights.

Parallel to this inspection, the prosecutor general should propose amendments to the code of criminal procedure where suspects are informed of their right to legal advice, right to medical treatment and the right to inform family members of their detention, immediately after their arrest, which the present code fails to provide.

He should also issue instructions to all prosecutors of the Court of First Instance to be proactive in detecting torture or ill treatment when police bring suspects to be formally charged. These prosecutors should examine the body and the state of mind of suspects to detect torture, especially within the first 72 hours of their arrest. If they find any signs of ill treatment, they should promptly call for a medical examination, order a prompt investigation and prosecute the perpetrators.
--
(Lao Mong Hay is a senior researcher at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. He was previously director of the Khmer Institute of Democracy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 2003. In 1997, he received an award from Human Rights Watch and the Nansen Medal in 2000 from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.)