By Benjamin Braden
Special to The Daily Star
BEIRUT: “Lebanon played a pioneering role by being the first state in the Middle East and North Africa to sign” a key international document to combat torture, says Esther Schaufelberger, sipping coffee at the ESCWA building in downtown Beirut. But on the national level, much work remains to be done.
Schaufelberger is in Lebanon to discuss local implementation of OPCAT, the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture, along with several dozen politicians, representatives of the military and other NGO activists.
She represents the Swiss-based Association of the Prevention of Torture at the seminar, sponsored by the Justice Ministry and hosted by the UN.
With the ratification of OPCAT in 2008, Lebanon took on commitments that have yet to be fulfilled.
The optional protocol is the first international human rights instrument that seeks to prevent torture and other forms of ill-treatment by establishing a system of regular visits to places of detention, carried out not only by independent international bodies but also a national institution, which is still to be established in Lebanon.
In France, such an institution already exists in the form of Jean-Marie Delarue, the general controller of the country’s detention facilities.
Delarue told seminar participants that it was important for him and his team to examine the detention system like “ethnologists,” to become well acquainted with each facility and thus able to uncover hidden practices of torture, such as the facility’s personnel “forgetting” to switch off the lights in certain cells.
“Prisons in Lebanon are overcrowded and people are living under very poor sanitary conditions. This is a bitter reality,” says General Pierre Nasser from the Interior Ministry.
Baalbek-Hermel lawmaker Marwan Fares, a member of Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, said some prisons should be “destroyed,” decrying conditions at the Zahle facility, where “almost 30 or 40 inmates are in the same cell, which should only fit four.”
The two-day seminar, which ended Friday, promoted the establishment of Lebanon’s own National Prevention Mechanism (NPM), whether in the form of an ombudsman like Delarue, or a commission.
In June, Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar established a committee to draft a proposal to set up the NPM, and the committee submitted its proposal to the ministry on September 30. A fully fledged government has only been in place since early November, but on December 22, Lebanon missed the deadline for the establishment of the NPM and there is “no timeline” for the finalization of the draft law, according to Omar Natour, the director general of the Justice Ministry.
Nonetheless, Nadim Houry from Human Rights Watch is generally hopeful that “what has been so far a transparent process continues. It is essential that this draft proposal and consultative process achieve the enactment of the NPM.
This draft must not meet the fate of so many other draft laws in Lebanon.”
While the Justice Ministry does not consider the draft legislation ready for distribution, meaning that it wasn’t available at the seminar, civil society activists say that that the ball is now in the court of the ministry.
The ministry has to put the law forward as Lebanon is obliged to implement its obligations while the stakeholders could use the seminar to keep up the momentum.
“These meetings are good in principle to share views, to profit from the experience abroad and to continue the dialogue between civil society, polity and military about the subject of torture in general, and especially about the NPM,” says Rola Badran from the Palestinian Human Rights Organization.
However, despite a general consensus regarding the need for an NPM, the details involve differing viewpoints.
Houry and many other activists want to see an independent institution that’s exclusively responsible for monitoring detention facilities.
But Metn parliamentarian Ghassan Mokheiber, a prominent lawyer and human rights campaigner, favors a national human rights institution that incorporates the NPM.
“I compare [the approach] to a truck. We are building a truck as an administrative vehicle, but only allowing it to carry one thing – the NPM. Let’s allow it to carry more baggage,” Mokheiber said.
Other activists say such an all-embracing approach could delay the possibly swift establishment of the NPM.
But all agree that it should be independent from the executive branch and financially autonomous, and should be staffed by impartial experts.
About 5,300 people are currently imprisoned in Lebanon, around 65 percent of them being pre-trial prisoners.
While Lebanese law prohibits torture, a number of detainees, including suspected Islamists and suspected spies for Israel, have told human rights groups that their interrogators beat and tortured them.
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