By Marie Dhumières
Wednesday, March 02, 2011

BEIRUT: Human rights activists gathered in Beirut Tuesday for a professional workshop on tools to monitor and prevent torture in prisons and detention centers.

“In Lebanon [torture] happens in official and other unofficial detention centers,” said Darine al-Hage, executive director of the Human Rights organization Alef.
She argued that the main goal was to “prevent torture rather than merely react” when a torture case is discovered.
Some 20 human rights activists, bloggers and students attended the workshop, organized by Alef and held in Hamra, as part of a global Dutch-sponsored project aimed at raising awareness of the issue.
A report released last month by the Lebanese Center for Human Rights, “Arbitrary Detention and Torture: The Bitter Reality of Lebanon,” mentioned that 60 percent of detained suspects in Lebanon are subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.
“There is no national legal framework to fight torture and there are not a lot of people aware of this human rights issue, this is why there is no prevention and no accountability,” Hage added.

Assaad Thebiah, a 23-year-old student and blogger, decided to take part in the workshop to learn “how the security forces are dealing with people taken into custody, what human rights violations are happening.”
“Everybody tries to [picture] Lebanon as different to other Arab countries, [that we have] more democracy, that we are kind of superior to the others,” he said.

Lebanon ratified the U.N. Optional Protocol of the Convention against Torture in 2008 and last month, the Internal Security Forces launched a Prevention of Torture Committee that, according to Hage, has already received more than 700 complaints of torture.

“We are optimistic now with the establishment of the committee in the ISF but we still don’t know how it’s going to function,” she added.

Several rights organizations are calling for the implementation of a “National Prevention Mechanism” against different kinds of torture and human-rights violations. Alef is also pushing the government to change the ambiguous definition of torture in the national criminal code and to criminalize torture.

Hatem Mokdadi, the coordinator of the Palestinian Human Rights Organization, said he wanted to learn about the different types of torture and “how the Lebanese authorities are dealing with torture and with Palestinian prisoners.”

Hage said those most vulnerable to torture were migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBT people and drug addicts, but added it didn’t mean that “Other Lebanese people are not tortured as well,” especially those arrested on suspicions of spying for Israel.

Ghenwa Samhat, from the Youth Fighting Drugs organization, said that her organization was “lobbying for the government to change the laws in a way that not any higher power can insult or torture a drug user when he is arrested.”

The second session of the workshop on torture prevention will take place Thursday, with a lecture on the relation between torture and arbitrary detention by lawyer Nizar Saghiyeh, known for his work on migrant workers and issues of arbitrary detention.