More than half of the women arrested by the Lebanese authorities in 2013 and 2014 were subjected to severe torture, according to a human rights group report.
Male investigators have consistently used physical violence, intimidation and violation of privacy against female detainees after their arrest, said a report published Thursday by the Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH).
The majority of women interviewed by CLDH revealed that they had been subject to one or more of the aforementioned practices during their detention.
"Men and women continue to face systematic and widespread torture during investigations," said Wadih al-Asmar, secretary-general of CLDH, in a press conference. “We hoped, in preparing this report, that women would be less affected than men by arbitrary detention and torture, but it is not the case.”
The group said that article 47 of Lebanon’s Criminal Procedure Code was “insufficient to protect people in custody from torture.”
The main reason being defendants are not granted a confidential meeting with their lawyers, and therefore are prevented from revealing being tortured.
The report also stated that police had been extending the duration of holding a person in custody without any judiciary intervention.
“Investigating judges have continued during the studied period to endorse confessions extracted under torture, without revoking them or ordering investigations into the allegations,” the group said in the press release accompanying the report’s publishing.
The activist group said it had been monitoring the practices of torture in all Lebanese prisons since 2009, and had interviewed random samples of people arrested by different security agencies.
“Unfortunately, CLDH findings are invariably the same from 2009 to 2014,” the group said. “For five years, the rate of torture of all persons arrested in Lebanon remains unchanged at around 60 percent.”
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