Campaign to tackle torture in Lebanese prisons

A series of television commercials and billboards have sprung up across Lebanon focusing on the issue of torture in prisons and detention centres in the country. At first glance the posters scattered across Lebanon’s clogged up highways drew questions from confused motorists as the message coming from them was an intriguing yet engaging way to raise awareness about the issue.

In them, a person stands with their back exposed as if cowering from their tormentor, with the

poster’s main title etched across the poster. It reads “their  suffering isn’t a pleasure” switching around a common Arabic phrase a person replies when someone has completed a favour for another, i.e if a favour has been done for someone that person will usually say to the other  “I’ve troubled you” which literally translates from Arabic as I’ve tortured or tormented you!

The important message within the campaign is to address the many cases of alleged torture

within prisons and detention centres in Lebanon. I spoke to Darine Al-Haj, the director of ‘Alef’, the NGO that launched the campaign with the funding coming completely from the Dutch Embassy in Beirut. She told me:

“Our aim is to try and create debate amongst Lebanese society and the authorities about the cases of torture that have been happening in Lebanese prisons, and it has worked.” The NGO and civil society organisation which     works with advocacy groups and government departments such as the Ministry of Interior and Internal Security has been getting positive responses from people and media outlets approaching and enquiring more about the current situation and wanting to know what is being done and how the authorities have been cooperating with them.

Darine tells me that their requests for action on the matter from authorities have often been met with contradictory approaches when she tells me “there have been times when some departments within the government have accepted there have been cases of torture within the prison system, and then there have been outright rejections from other sections.”

However, what she is clear on is that through the numerous closed discussions between NGO’s, human rights and civil society groups, the army and Internal Security Forces (ISF) and numerous high ranking MPs in the ministries of interior and defense, is that there are indeed cases and that these are being addressed. In addition to this, it seems that the authorities are taking the matter seriously with human rights committees focused on the prevention of torture in both the ISF and army.

Darine El-Hage argues that although there have been isolated cases of recognition within the authorities of torture taking place in state prisons, there has to be a more comprehensive government approach to the problem.

One prominent MP in the Lebanese Parliament and law maker that I spoke to is Ghassan Moukheiber, who told me that the government is working towards uncovering incidences of torture in Lebanese prisons and stamping the practice out. Moukheiber is a delegate in the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee, showing how high up this portfolio has gone up within the government’s agenda.

He tells me that this committee is doing things like stepping up visits to prisons and liaising with prison authorities and making the current government provisions that are working to stamp out prison torture more effective and robust in their tackling of the issue, whilst adhering to Lebanon’s international obligations and an Optional Protocol on torture convention that Lebanon signed and ratified back in 2008 as well as in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The committee has also taken up the initiative of training officers in new techniques in investigations and investigating other ways in stamping out torture in prisons once and for all.

(Ghassan Moukheiber is the Greek-Orthodox elected MP for the Metn district in Mount Lebanon.)

Hesham Shawish