American President Demands
Humane Treatment of Prisoners

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”
       …..— George Washington, September 14, 1775:
……….     Charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force

[NOTE: If this post looks familiar, thanks — you're obviously a regular reader of the Refuge Media Project blog. I'll be on the road today, so thought I would honor the day by repeating what turned out to be one of our all-time most popular posts, first published last year.]

No mail today. I forgot – it’s Washington’s Birthday. When you work at home, you can lose track of what’s going on in the real world. Still, focused as I am on the issue of torture and its impact both on its victims and its perpetrators, this is a national hero I try not to forget about. In a speech published by the Los Angeles Time toward the end of 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., noted that “Revolutionary War leaders, including Washington and the Continental Congress, considered the decent treatment of enemy combatants to be one of the principal strategic preoccupations of the American Revolution.”

“While Americans extended quarter to combatants as a matter of right and treated their prisoners with humanity,” Kennedy said, “British regulars and German mercenaries were threatened by their own officers with severe punishment if they showed mercy to a surrendering American soldier. Captured Americans were tortured, starved and cruelly maltreated aboard prison ships.” Washington’s stance, he noted, “puts to shame the conduct of America’s present leadership,” and he concluded that “America’s treatment of its prisoners is a test of our faith in our country and the character of our leaders.”

Kennedy was, of course, talking about the administration of then-President George W. Bush. I remain wistfully hopeful that the Obama administration – eventually – will reverse its predecessor’s policies, but the changes so far seem mostly cosmetic.
.       ….In his Huffington Post blog for February 19, 2007, Scott Horton wrote “Against a loud public outcry of ‘an eye for an eye,’ George Washington stood fast. He made it a point of fundamental honor (and that was his word) that the Americans would not only hold dearly to the laws of war, they would define a new law of war that reflected the humanitarian principles for which the new Republic had risen.” After crossing the Delaware River to defeat the British and Hessian armies at Trenton, our first Commander-in-Chief’ gave the order,  to “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”
….       .As David Hackett Fischer wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Washington’s Crossing: “In a desperate struggle [he] found a way to defeat a formidable enemy… [He] reversed the momentum of the war. [He] improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition. And [he] chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution.”
..       …You can hear or read the transcript of Robert Krulwich’s interview with Professor Fischer on NPR’s website.  On the antiwar.com blog, Scott Horton (same name, different person) notes that, following the battle at Trenton, Washington intervened when he came across some of the Continental troops preparing to force Hessian prisoners to run the “gauntlet.” And it worked, he says: “Many of the German Hessians in fact joined the revolutionaries in their fight against the English and stayed here in America to be free when the war was won. Must we abandon this legacy? Is it already too late to reclaim it?” Good question…

(If ordering books or DVDs discussed in this blog from Amazon, please consider doing so through our website, which will help to support the work of The Refuge Media Project. Click on the book title above to be redirected to our site.)

Thursday-Friday, March 8-9, 2012

Fostering the Resilient Spirit: Holistic
Responses in the Torture Treatment Field
Sponsored by the National Partnership for
Community Training & Tulane University

Location: Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

Speakers Include:
Richard Mollica and James Lavelle, Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma;
Allen Keller and Hawthorne E. Smith, Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture;
Leslie Velez, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service;
Abbey Weiss, Center for Victims of Torture;
And others…

Registration and Additional Information here, or call (305) 805-5060

__________________________________________ 

Saturday & Sunday, March 24-25 

Physicians for Human Rights National Conference:
Sustainable Connections & Collaborations
for Health & Human Rights 

Location: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

This year’s PHR National Conference is being held in conjunction with the Sujal Parikh Memorial Symposium for Health & Social Justice, in memory of a University of Michigan medical student active in PHR’s Student Program.

Click for Additional Information

___________________________________________________

Saturday & Sunday, March 31-April 1, 2012

The Asylum Program of Physicians for Human Rights is offering two training programs for health professionals seeking to aid asylum seekers and other immigrant survivors of torture and human rights abuses:

Saturday, 3/31

Introduction to Physical and Psychological Documentation of Trauma
For those with no formal training and moderate to no experience conducting forensic medical examinations. Location: Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA

Sunday, 4/1

Advanced Forensic Training for Experienced Volunteers:
Techniques for Increased Effectiveness of Evaluations and Testimony
For evaluators who have attended past trainings or are experienced in providing forensic medical examination.
Location: Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, MA

For details contact PHR

(NOTE: PHR also offers self-guided online training on forensic investigation.)

 ___________________________________________________

Friday, Saturday & Sunday, March 30-April 1, 2012

Amnesty International’s Annual Human Rights Conference, on the theme of “Rise Up for Rights.” The Annual General Meeting includes events for youth participants as well as all human rights activists.

Location: Denver, CO

For details contact Amnesty International

………..

A study co-sponsored by the Research Institute Without Walls, Physicians for Human Rights, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility is exploring the impact of immigration detention on LGBT persons. According to the researchers, the results of the study, LGBT Persons in Immigration Detention: Mental Health Needs and Challenges, “will be helpful to all of us who provide mental health and legal services to LGBT immigrants and refugees.” The study leaders are:

• Ariel Shidlo, PhD, psychologist and Co-Director, Research Institute Without Walls (RIWW)
• Mike Corradini, JD, Asylum Advocacy Associate, Physicians for Human Rights
• Joan Ahola, MD, LGBT Asylum Research Coordinator for RIWW; Medical Director, Weill Cornell Medic al Center

Interviews will be confidential:
The researchers are looking for people who have been in immigration detention and may be willing to be interviewed in person or via phone or Skype. Interviewees need only give their first names, and the study leaders promise that their participation will be confidential. To volunteer or for more information, email Ariel Shidlo at Research Institute Without Walls.
For a quick look at what LGBT detainees are up against, check out this article from Chicago Now, or this report from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, source of the photo above. A quick web search on “immigration detention — LGBT” will yield many more.

…………

Nothing Has Changed

Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska died yesterday at the age of 88. NPR’s David Orr describes her as a “poet of gentle irony,” but her irony could be visceral and corrosive as well. I was introduced to Szymborska’s poetry when a reader sent us a copy of her poem, “Tortures,” from a 1986 collection, The People on the Bridge.

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones–
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among these landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

Translation: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
© Wislawa Szymborska, Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh

Wislawa Szymborska’s Tortures is included in an excellent collection, Poems New and Collected, translated by Baranczak and Cavanagh.

…………

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­In his January 25th op-ed piece for the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof tells the depressingly familiar story of a desperate 13-year-old girl trying to escape from the vicious pimp who has been marketing her “services” through online ads on Backpage.com. Almost equally depressing, it turns out that Backpage is owned by Village Voice media, owner of the Village Voice newspaper. The site, says Kristof, “is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.”
…………Despite a national campaign of several years standing — as well as demands from the attorneys general of 48 states to eliminate the ads, Village Voice Media has refused to back down. (The photo at the beginning of this paragraph is from an ad campaign launched by The Rebecca Project and other groups more than a year ago, calling on Village Voice to do the right thing — so far without effect.)
…………Psychologist Melissa Farley is the founder of Prostitution Research & Education, a 15-year-old San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to the abolition of trafficking and prostitution.  She is the lead author of the two studies mentioned in my recent post on Sexual Abuse & Trafficking. Melissa wrote in response to that post, suggesting several points that she thinks are of particular importance in discussing Garden of Truth, the group’s report on the prostitution and trafficking of Native American women in Minnesota. I agree, and wanted to pass her suggestions along:

The women’s poverty, their 98% rate of current or previous homelessness, the post-colonial theft of land and cultural identity,  and the racism which results in a lack of educational and employment opportunities – all of these, to me and to them also, I think – are coercive. When you live in a place where the temperature falls below freezing and you are homeless, and someone offers to exchange sexual assault for a place to spend the night – to me that is trafficking, even though the Trafficking Victims Protection Act wouldn’t define it as such. Poverty, homelessness and racist lack of opportunities can coerce people into prostitution, but it’s not called “trafficking.” That’s a shortcoming of our law. We define trafficking as third party exploitation or control.  And the control can be and often is psychological in nature.
…………— Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research & Education

Like many others, Farley notes that the definition of trafficking used by the United States – which necessitates that the victim herself prove “force, fraud, or coercion” – is excessively conservative. By contrast, she points out, the law in most Scandinavian countries focuses on perpetrators rather than victims. Sweden’s legislation, for example, de-criminalizes prostitution, and offers federally-funded supports for those seeking to escape it. At the same time, it enforces criminal sanctions against traffickers and purchasers of sex.
…………It’s reported that street prostitution in Sweden has been cut in half by this approach, without leading to an increase in other areas (e.g., via internet sites like Backpage.) Janice Raymond, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women writes that “the success of the Nordic model is not so much in penalizing the men (the penalties are modest) as in removing the invisibility of men who are outed when they get caught. This, in turn, makes it less appealing for pimps and traffickers to set up shop in countries where the customer base fears the loss of its anonymity, and is declining.”

(For more information on this approach, see Trafficking, Prostitution and the Sex Industry: The Nordic Legal Model, by Raymond, or The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services by Gunilla Ekberg in the journal Violence Against Women.)

NOTE: The image to the right, above, is by New York artist Mona Mark, and was created for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’s Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing (1995). Courtesy: Prostitution Research & Education

Some Resources:

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Promotes women’s human rights by working internationally to combat sexual exploitation in all its forms. The first international NGO to focus on human trafficking, especially sex trafficking of women and girls.

Human Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation
A blog by Heidi Hermann on groups fighting human trafficking in southern California, as well as nationally and internationally. (See Heidi’s right-column blogroll for other related organizations.)

National Human Trafficking Resource Center
The Polaris Project: For a World Without Slavery offers a toll-free, confidential hotline for issues related to trafficking.

Prostitution Research & Education
PRE’s goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution, including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution.

The Rebecca Project for Human Rights
Advocates for justice, dignity and policy reform for vulnerable women and girls in the United States and in Africa.

…………

An email from the Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service reminds me that today, January 11, is Human Trafficking Awareness Day. Dedicated to raising awareness of and opposition to human trafficking, the day was established three years ago by the U.S. Senate. This year, President Obama has dedicated the entire month of January to trafficking prevention, though it’s not clear to me that any increase in Federal funding follows from either of these pronouncements. I guess we can appreciate the thought.
            In the opening pages of Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild’s history of the slavery abolition movement in England (which considerably preceded that in the United States) he notes that “at the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various forms of slavery or serfdom…close to eighty thousand chained and shackled Africans were loaded onto slave ships and transported to the New World each year.”
            “But this was the world – our world – just two centuries ago,” he comments, “and to most people then, it was unthinkable that it could ever be otherwise.” 
            Later in the book Hochschild introduces Thomas Clarkson, a 25-year-old student writing an essay on the slave trade to compete for a coveted prize at Cambridge University. He did win, and intended to ride his success into a career as a clergyman. Instead, he became obsessed with what he had learned in his research. Midway on his ride to London, Clarkson wrote, “I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.” He dedicated the rest of his life to putting an end to slavery.
            Human trafficking represents the survival of one of the most vicious forms of slavery and, as it was 200 years ago, it’s hard for many people today to believe that we can ever abolish it. But perhaps the time is coming when we can begin to “see these calamities to their end.” The groups highlighted below are working to end the sex trade and, in the meantime, are providing help and support to its victims and those who care for them. There are many other excellent organizations working in this field which I’ll try to list in future posts.

• Prostitution Research and Education does research and consulting on prostitution, pornography and trafficking. Its goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while at the same time advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution – including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution. I’ve written about some of this group’s research in the past and will be following up on some of  that in the next few days.  
• Lutheran Immigration & Refugee Service The LIRS website offers a number of trafficking-related links and resources including this resource guide for social service providers from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
• U.S. Committee for Refugees & Immigrants in Washington, DC, is one of three agencies offering assistance to victims under the National Human Trafficking Victim Assistance Project. The others are Tapestri in Atlanta, and Heartland Human Care Services in Chicago. Interested service providers can contact the visit the USCRI site to determine which organization services their State.
• The Polaris Project seeks to combat trafficking through training, advocacy, and public outreach. It operates a 24-hour trafficking hotline and offers social services to victims in New Jersey and Washington, DC. The Project’s blog, The North Star offers a range of content much of it – in approach and tone — seemingly aimed at teens.

Even the business-oriented periodical Forbes weighed in on this issue a few days ago, with an interesting post by contributor Nicole Skibola. (Unfortunately, Technology, Business, and Anti-Human Trafficking Innovation was relegated to the publication’s “Corporate Social Responsibility” blog, which is probably not high priority breakfast reading for the point-one percent.)
            The article’s main focus is on efforts by companies such as Microsoft and Google to support technological responses to trafficking, in light of the fact that the sex “industry” itself is taking full advantage of those technologies. Skibola cites research by Microsoft which “described the Internet as the number one platform for buying and selling women and children for sex in the United States.”
            In her lead, Skibola writes, “Could you have possibly imagined that there are 30 million slaves in the world today, more than any other point in human history?…A 2011 CNN article estimated that there are 100,000 to 300,000 children between 11 and 14 who are vulnerable to being sold for sex by pimp-captors every year in the United States, according to government statistics.” The scale of this crime against humanity is approaching the scale of eighteenth century slavery.

(NOTES: The Forbes article also mentions a number of corporate and foundation initiatives offering grant support for technology initiatives in this area — grantseekers take note. The photo immediately above is of Justin Timberlake, participating in the DNA Foundation’s anti-trafficking campaign.)

After helping him escape to Pakistan when he was ten years old (he thinks) Enaiat’s mother made him promise never to use drugs, use weapons, cheat or steal. She also told him always to keep a wish in front of his eyes: “It’s in trying to satisfy our wishes that we find the strength to pick ourselves up.” The next morning she was gone, back to her other children in their village in Afghanistan.
            As members of the Hazara minority, Enaiat’s family suffered discrimination by the majority Pashtun, which had become dangerously aggravated with the rise of the Taliban. His mother had made the terrible choice to help her oldest son escape in search of a better life.   
            This slim, illuminating “novel” tells the story of Enaiatollah Akbari’s five-year odyssey through Iran, Turkey, and Greece before finally being granted asylum in Italy. It’s based on conversations between the author, Fabio Geda, and Enaiat, a young asylee from Afghanistan.
            While working on the documentary, Refuge, I’ve been privileged to hear at least the bare bones of some torture survivors’ stories of persecution and escape, but most of us have no concept of what those who arrive on at our borders seeking political asylum have gone through to get here.  In the Sea There are Crocodiles brings those experiences vividly to life. Enaiat’s travels include a month-long trek through the mountains of Iran to Turkey, during which 12 out of 77 immigrants died; days stuffed into an airless compartment under a truck’s load of rocks, and a simultaneously comic and terrifying crossing to Greece in a leaking rubber raft. But the story also includes episodes of kindnesses from strangers, and of the remarkable solidarity among these involuntary travelers, many of them children.

The book is punctuated by little exchanges between the author, Fabio Geda, and Enaiatollah. After the story of one elderly lady’s kindnesses to the boy, Geda says: 

“You tell me things, Enaiat, and then immediately you go on to something else. Tell me more about this lady. Describe her house.”
            “Why?”           
            ”What do you mean, why? I’m interested. Other people might be, too.”
            “Yes, but I already told you. I’m only interested in what happened. The lady is important for what she did. Her name doesn’t matter. What her house was like doesn’t matter. She could have been anybody.”
            “How do you mean, anybody?”
            “Anybody could have behaved like that.”

But so few do…

In the Sea There are Crocodiles, by Fabio Geda
Based on the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari
Translated from Italian by Howard Curtis
Doubleday, New York, 2010, translation © 2011

……….

Who Are We, Really? 

In her blog post for The New Yorker, Amy Davidson asks, “Is it enough, in a place like Afghanistan, to believe that we are good? One of the many striking aspects of the Washington Post’s story, on how our forces sent prisoners to an Afghan detention center despite what seem to have been solid warnings that they would be tortured there, is the nature of some of the denials: they are based not on what happened, but on who we think we are.” One example she cites, quoting a U.S. official: “If there had been ‘serious, substantive allegations of systemic institutional torture of detainees, the embassy would have acted on these.”
            In other words, “We are good people. Good people would have responded to allegations of torture. We did not respond. Therefore there were no allegations or, if allegations were made, they cannot have been serious or substantive.” It’s an important, provocative piece; check it out.

Torture in Syria’s hospitals

An editorial in the November 5, 2011 issue of The Lancet deals with international concern over the abuse – in some cases torture – of physicians caring for victims of state violence in government-run Syrian hospitals.

“Doctors in state-run hospitals in Syria are facing a grievous trade-off: to offer treatment and risk torture to patients and possibly themselves, or withhold treatment to those under their care. A report by Amnesty International, published on Oct 25, 2011, alleges that patients with firearms injuries admitted to state-run hospitals are being targeted and tortured by the authorities to quell dissent that has spread throughout the country since March, 2011. The central blood bank, which is controlled by the Syrian Ministry of Defence, is the sole provider of blood. Therefore, doctors face a dilemma every time they receive a patient with firearm injuries: if they request blood for transfusion, the authorities will be alerted, putting the patient at risk of arrest, torture, and death.

Sadly, as the editorial also notes, the Amnesty report also cites incidents in which medical personnel have mistreated or denied care to wounded patients based on their ethnicity or politics.

Supreme Court Will Hear Torture
Suits vs. International Corporations

Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr reported in October that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider two cases determining whether international corporations can be sued in American courts for complicity in torture that takes place in other countries. In one case, a group of Nigerians claimed, under the 200-year-old Alien Tort Statute, that units of Royal Dutch Shell were complicit in torture and executions in the Ogoni region in the early nineties, including the killing of well-known playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. 
            A divided (2-1) federal appeals court threw out the case, saying companies cannot be sued under the statute creating, in the words of the victim/plaintiffs, “a blanket immunity for corporations engaged or complicit in universally condemned human rights violations.” As Stohr reports, most courts to consider similar issues in the past have held that companies can be sued under the statute, so a decision to uphold the appeals court denial in this case would overturn established precedent.
            The second case was brought under the Torture Victims Protection Act, and involves the alleged torture and murder of a U.S. citizen by agents of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Liberation Organization. The TVPA authorizes suits against “an individual” engaged in torture. The case was thrown out by the appeals court, which ruled that the term means only “natural persons,” not corporations or organizations. It would be interesting to see how the Supreme Court justices could justify agreeing with that argument after ruling, in the “Citizens United” case that corporations are persons for the purpose of campaign contributions.
            The cases will be argued before the court next year, with a possible decision by June.

…….

Voluminous documents, establishing once and for all the complicity of American private corporations in the “rendering” of “war on terror” suspects for torture, have been revealed in an unlikely forum. Though both the Bush and Obama administrations have done their sloppy best to keep details of the rendition program hidden from U.S. voters, they turned out to be powerless to keep their private sector contractors from publicly haggling over the spoils.
            As Ian Cobain and Ben Quinn reported in the Guardian in early September, previously unreleased details of the torture flights – including the names of some of the private carriers involved (along with their executives) – have come to light in a New York court case involving two private airlines, Sportsflight and Richmor, over who did or didn’t get paid how much and by whom. One potential consequence, according to the Guardian article, “may be that some of those corporations and individuals are now at risk of being sued in proceedings brought on behalf of the al-Qaida and Taliban suspects who were the victims of the programme.”

“The documents were discovered by staff at the legal charity Reprieve. Its legal director, Cori Crider, said: ‘These documents reveal how the CIA’s secret network of torture sites was able to operate unchecked for so many years. They also reveal what a farce it was that the CIA managed to get the prisoners’ torture claims kicked out as secret, while all of the details of its sinister business were hiding in plain site.’”

The Red Sox Connection

The story wasn’t widely reported in the U.S. press (though note Amy Davidson’s piece for The New Yorker) and I kind of dropped the ball on it at the time. However, I was struck by today’s expanded story by Sharon Churcher and Christ Hastings in Britain’s Daily Mail. Their piece includes considerably more detail on one of the aircraft owners who has special significance for us here in the United States – and in the Boston area in particular. Phillip Morse, the “ultimate owner” of one of the planes, according to both newspapers, is the vice-chairman of the Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox. According to Cobain and Quinn, the same plane was used to fly the team “in between rendition flights.” Fenway Sports Group also recently acquired Britain’s Liverpool Football (soccer) Club, at which point the Daily Mail took notice:

“The disclosure that such a senior figure in New England Sports Ventures (NESV) has been paid millions by the CIA is likely to alarm football fans already concerned that one of the country’s most prestigious clubs is still in American hands.
            “A European Parliament report linked the jet directly to the abduction of Abu Omar, an Islamic preacher, who was snatched from a Milan street by the CIA in 2003 before being taken to Cairo…despite having been granted political asylum by the Italian government…
            ”The European Parliament report reproduced flight documents for Mr Morse’s jet, which carries the logo of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, also owned by NESV, on its tail fin.” 

(Photo above: Phillip Morse during a White House visit with George Bush Senior.)

…….

Video: Forensic Evidence Helps Unravel
Coverup of Torture by Egyptian Police

In June, 2010, Khaled Said was publicly tortured and beaten to death by Egyptian police. A new video from the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims focuses on how forensic assessments by the IRCT and its Egyptian member center, El Nadeem, helped to demolish the police coverup and spark the Tahrir Square revolution that erupted six months later. The video, World Without Torture, is a little slow at times, but the information it provides is vital and timely, and the sections focusing on the Said case are totally riveting. It’s in English but can be screened with French, Spanish, or Arabic subtitles.
                The IRCT is the world leader in promoting the use of medical examination and forensic evidence in the investigation and prosecution of torture cases, both in the courts and by human rights institutions. 
            World Without Torture and other videos can also be viewed on the IRCT’s website (including Be a Part of the Solution, an award-winning spot developed for the IRCT by the Refuge Media Project.)

“Torture often takes place in secrecy, and many torture methods are designed to be as painful as possible without leaving physical marks. A key purpose of documentation, in a word, is to make it impossible for perpetrators to deny their crimes…
            “Perpetrators are seldom brought to court; and torture survivors rarely receive any kind of redress. In a climate of impunity, perpetrators of torture can continue their crimes without risking arrest, prosecution or punishment. Besides adding to the suffering of the victims, such a situation leads to a general lack of trust in justice and the rule of law. Consequently, few complaints are brought forward and few actual prosecutions are made.”
                                                     — From the IRCT website

…….