For Prisoners in Afghanistan, Torture is the Old Normal

By William Fisher

While the debate about "nation-building" in Afghanistan shows no signs of cooling down, there's at least one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on: Criminal justice in Afghanistan will not be improved by giving the police free rein of the prisons.

In fact, Human Rights Watch (HRW) finds that "greater police involvement in jails is likely to lead to more torture, not less."

This is the view of the organization's HRW's Asia Director, Brad Adams. He is asking that President Hamid Karzai to revoke a decree that puts detainees in Afghan-run prisons at heightened risk of torture and ill treatment."

The decree, signed by Karzai at the end of last year, would transfer control of Afghan prisons from the Justice Ministry to the Interior Ministry, which operates the Afghan National Police.

Placing all prisoners under Interior Ministry control increases the likelihood that the Afghan police, long implicated in torture and other ill treatment, would have direct authority over criminal suspects during interrogation, HRW said.

Despite Karzai's insistence on the transfer of all prisoners to Afghan control, "Criminal justice in Afghanistan will not be improved by giving the police free rein of the prisons," said Adams.

The proposed transfer reverses an August 2003 decree by Karzai that transferred prisons - which hold both pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners - from the Interior Ministry to the Justice Ministry, an act then widely regarded as a crucial reform of the justice system.

But "Greater police involvement in jails is likely to lead to more torture, not less," Adams said.

"The snail's pace of human rights improvement over the past year heightens anxieties about Afghanistan's future," Adams said. "Basic rights are still not a reality for most Afghans. The country suffers from abuses without accountability, lack of rule of law, poor governance, laws and policies that harm women, attacks on civilians, and corruption."

"Under-resourced and poorly trained Afghan Police units frequently rely on abusive law enforcement methods. Giving police greater control over prisoners -in particular pretrial detainees - increases the risk of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment as they try to obtain confessions and other information from suspects," he asserted.

Karzai first proposed the transfer of authority following the escape of more than 470 prisoners from a prison in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in April 2011. International donor agencies and Afghan human rights organizations opposed the transfer on the basis that the Justice Ministry, despite its own limitations, was ultimately the more appropriate ministry to be running Afghanistan's detention facilities.

"The serious problems in Afghanistan's prisons won't be solved by turning over prisoners to another ministry with a worse record of abuse," Adams said.

An October 2011 report by the United Nations documented widespread and systematic torture and mistreatment in Afghan prisons, not only in illegal facilities operated by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but also in ordinary prisons, including some under Interior Ministry control. The allegations were so serious and credible that NATO immediately suspended transfer of prisoners to 16 Afghan prisons. The UN report highlighted that nearly all torture observed in Afghan jails took place during interrogations for the purpose of seeking confessions.

The Afghan government denied that torture was systematic, but acknowledged "deficiencies," including keeping prisoners in indefinite detention and not allowing them to see lawyers. The government asserted that abuses were due to a lack of training and resources. The government also pledged to uphold all national and international standards regarding protection of prisoners.

Karzai's decree further imperils the rights of prisoners, calling into question the government's stated commitment to end torture and ill treatment, HRW said.

In a related issue, another US-based organization, Human Rights First (HRF) has called on the Obama Administration "to finally begin to provide due process for the thousands of suspected insurgents the U.S. military holds without charge or trial at Bagram Air Base."

According to the organization, despite the Obama Administration's plan to withdraw troops by 2014, the U.S. government has no plans to shutter the Bagram detention facility anytime soon. In fact, after having quadrupled the number of detainees held there since President Obama took office, defense department officials recently acknowledged that they are doubling the prison's capacity. It currently holds about 2,600 detainees.

As Human Rights First explained in a May 2011 report following an on-the-ground investigation in Afghanistan earlier this year, the U.S. military is failing to provide detainees at the detention facility at Bagram a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they supported the Taliban or otherwise participated in attacks against U.S. forces.

According to the organization, despite the Obama Administration's plan to withdraw troops by 2014, the U.S. government has no plans to shutter the Bagram detention facility anytime soon. In fact, after having quadrupled the number of detainees held there since President Obama took office, defense department officials recently acknowledged that they are doubling the prison's capacity. It currently holds about 2,600 detainees.

Prisoners are not allowed to have legal representation, and have no right to see the evidence against them. Although they receive rudimentary hearings where they are allowed to make a statement, based on our direct observation of these hearings, we believe they do not meet even the minimum international standards of due process, and do not allow the U.S. military to determine whether the detainee has actually participated in the insurgency or poses a danger to U.S. forces and therefore needs to be imprisoned.

In its report, HRF set forth specific recommendations that the U.S. military can implement immediately to remedy the situation. These include providing military lawyers for the detainees at their hearings, and de-classifying more of the evidence used against the detainees, so that they can meaningfully respond to the allegations.

Eviatar concluded that the recent 10-year anniversary of US and NATO operations in Afghanistan should have been a good time for the United States to re-assess its detention strategy there.

In an HRF report written by Eviatar, she linked the growth of the Bagram facility to the growth of the detention problems confronting both Afghan and US jailers.

She said that since President Obama took office, the number of prisoners held by the U.S. in Afghanistan has almost tripled-from 600 in 2008 to 1700 in 2011. The U.S. Prison at Bagram now holds almost ten times as many detainees as are being held at Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners at the U.S.-run Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan now have the right to appear before a
board of military officers to plead for their release and challenge the claims that they are "enemy belligerents" fighting U.S. forces. But prisoners still do not have the right to see the evidence being used against them, or the right to a lawyer to represent them.

"Failure to provide due process to Afghan detainees is angering the local population and making Afghans less willing to cooperate with or trust U.S. forces. It is ultimately a counter-productive strategy that harms U.S. national security," Eviatar noted.

She concluded: "It is unconscionable that ten years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States still does not provide the minimum level of due process to its detainees there." Eviatar, who observed the hearings given to detainees in Afghanistan earlier last year, said, "The current system does not adequately distinguish between innocent men and those who pose a real danger to U.S. forces. Unfortunately, this is more likely to fuel the insurgency than to stop it."