By Emma Gatten
BEIRUT: Human rights lawyers sent an appeal to
the Justice Ministry and the Order of Physicians Wednesday urging them to end
the practice of conducting anal probes on detainees after 35 men were subjected
to the test over the weekend.
The men were detained Saturday after a raid by
the Vice Squad on a porn cinema in the Burj Hammoud area of Beirut, and were taken
to Hobeish police station in Ras Beirut. Among them was the owner of the
cinema. The Vice Squad is a subdivision of the Judicial Police and operates
according to judicial orders.
Once in Hobeish, the men underwent physical
examinations carried out by physicians, intended to determine homosexuality.
Three men were later charged under Article 534, which outlaws “unnatural sexual
acts,” after a physician told police he had been able to determine the men were
gay.
The owner of the cinema was also charged, as
well as another individual who did not have residency papers, according to an
ISF source.
Lebanese research organization Legal Agenda,
which focuses on legal and public policy issues, issued an open letter to the
justice minister Shakib Qortbawi Wednesday, urging him to end the practice of
conducting anal probes.
“The continuation of these tests is considered
to be a serious violation of the rights of the people who have been forced to
undergo them; this is a degrading act that undermines their dignity,” the
letter reads.
It argues that the test violates human rights,
rights to privacy, as well as the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
which Lebanon ratified in 2000. The tests are done with no written permission
from the detainees, and are conducted prior to any charge being laid down.
Nadim Houry, the deputy director of Human
Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said the case highlighted
two issues, that of the examinations and of article 534.
“Article 534 is a clear violation of rights to
privacy, and the right for anyone to live their private lives. The state has no
business intervening in the consensual acts of private lives,” he said.
“On the issue of the anal probe examinations,
they are first of all inherently degrading, violations of human dignity, and
amount to torture in some cases. Clearly when conducted in a police station
like Hobeish they’re done in a way to degrade people,” he added. He said the
targeting of people in raids like the one that took place Saturday had “the
atmosphere of a witch hunt.”
The letter from Legal Agenda also urges the
public prosecutor to “stop wasting public money.” Doctors who perform the tests
are paid between LL100,000 and LL125,000 by the state for each test.
It is not clear how often these tests take
place, although a doctor speaking at a seminar about the topic in May this year
said he performed them four or five times a month. Nizar Saghieh, a human
rights lawyer and one of the founders of Legal Agenda, said he estimated there
were around 10 doctors that perform the examinations.
The tests cannot be relied upon to prove
sexuality, another point picked up in the letter to Qortbawi, and a fact that
Houry said made the reliance on the tests for prosecution “insane.”
The letter also highlights the fact that the
tests are conducted before any charges are laid down, and often with little or
no evidence.
Judicial sources previously told The Daily
Star that the test should only be carried out if there is clear evidence of
homosexual conduct, but Saghieh said this often wasn’t the case.
Saghieh said that during investigation into
the topic he had found prosecutors would order the test “on occasions when
there is no evidence at all.
“We found that many other times when, if
somebody says that you are gay, they [can] arrest you, and then they make the
test on you,” he said. “They are violating the principle that everybody is
innocent until proven guilty.”
A spokesperson at the ISF said it opposed
article 534 and supported action for it to be abolished.
“The ISF supports civil society action that
would result in the abolition of the article that penalizes homosexuality,”
Colonel Joseph Msalem, a spokesperson for the ISF told The Daily Star
Wednesday. “This needs the help of civil society, activists, NGOs and the
government. The police do not like to go after these cases and such a sexual
act should be a right.”
But Houry said the abolition of 534 should not
be a prerequisite for the ending of the physical examinations.
“It’s [an issue] outside of 534,” he said.
“Nothing requires these tests to be conducted. It is done completely on the
discretion of the public prosecutor.”
Lebanese gay rights NGO Helem said it
considered the arrests to be based on an arbitrary law and questioned the role
television station MTV has taken in targeting homosexuality, as well as other
marginalized groups.
MTV was the first outlet to report the
arrests, in a broadcast that used derogatory language toward those arrested.
Helem said it was following
the case of the three men along with the aid of lawyers, and hoped to be able
to help secure their release.
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