At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka at the weekend, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that while his government ”deplores the use of torture, we accept that sometimes, in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen”.
His statement is not only legally and morally indefensible, it is also factually incorrect. Torture is prohibited under international law precisely because it is so reprehensible that no civilised society accepts it. The prohibition is absolute. Circumstances, no matter how difficult, can never be used to justify it.
But nor are the circumstances in Sri Lanka under which torture is used as difficult as the Prime Minister makes them out to be. In Sri Lanka, torture is most often used not in difficult circumstances but in routine police inquiries. It is endemic and pervasive precisely because it is used without regard for circumstances.
The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) in Hong Kong this year issued a 736-page report detailing more than 400 incidents of torture in Sri Lanka since 1998. Most pertain to ordinary criminal cases. They are from all parts of the island, not only areas directly affected by long-running civil war. The victims are both Sinhalese and Tamil. The stories are harrowing.
Sinnappan Kiragory was, in August 2006, arrested over a murder in Eheliyagoda, east of the country’s capital, Colombo. Policemen assaulted him with clubs and jumped on his body in front of his wife and small children, who were with him at the time of the arrest. Two days later, he died in custody.
Policemen in Bandaragama, near Colombo, told a man accused of jewellery theft in May 2009 that they would make him ”vomit the truth”. They tied him to a pole between two boxes and swung him around it, while beating him and forcing ground chillies into his eyes. When the man’s family came to the station, the police chased them away. They later forced the man to sign a document and charged him with a minor offence.
These cases are not a thing of the past. Because most cases of torture are not related to alleged terrorist acts or other events linked to the country’s civil conflict, they have continued relentlessly since the end of the war.
More than 100 of the cases documented by the ALRC occurred after 2010. Police south of Colombo detained and tortured Sunil Shantha in 2010 in order to please an influential person who held a grudge against him.
They suspended him from the ceiling of their station and rubbed chopped chillies into his eyes and genitalia. Later they hung him horizontally from a pole and beat the soles of his feet, before releasing him without charge.
In 2011, police north of Colombo stripped a Muslim suspect and paraded him naked in front of men and women while jeering and yelling obscenities at him. He had tried to intervene on behalf of one of his brothers, who was already in custody and had reportedly been assaulted.
Their counterparts in the northern central province of Anuradhapura last year strung Thusitha Ratnayake from the ceiling of their premises and beat him about the spine, legs and heels to have him confess to the theft of a necklace.
Despite lodging complaints with various authorities, including the country’s human rights commission, no action has been taken against the torturers.
The problem is not one of difficult circumstances but a lack of political will to address the incidence of torture. Creeping authoritarianism and militarisation in Sri Lanka have enabled its spread. Collapsed rule of law has meant that the courts and other institutions have also failed to halt it, despite the country having a domestic prohibition on torture since 1994.
Only a handful of police officers have ever been prosecuted for torture. Some have murdered their victims rather than have them testify. The government of Sri Lanka has increasingly rebuffed calls from international agencies and observers to give the law effect. Unfortunately, the Australian Prime Minister’s position on torture and attendant abuses does nothing to improve the situation.
Rather, it encourages the spread of existing practices. It emboldens the Sri Lankan government to continue thumbing its nose at United Nations human rights bodies. It also undermines the legitimacy of the Australian government on questions of human rights, diminishing our voice on matters of great importance not only to people in Sri Lanka but to hundreds of millions of others in countries across Asia.
In his attempts to do everything and anything to stop boats of asylum seekers from reaching our shores, Abbott is playing a game with damaging consequences, both for this country’s credibility, and for the human rights of Sri Lankans.
Dr Nick Cheesman is a research fellow at the department of political and social change in the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
