Maldives To Work With UN Torture Group

The Maldives yesterday narrowly missed out on being elected to the committee of a UN anti-torture group.

In a meeting held at the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, a ten-person international subcommittee for an anti-torture protocol was elected by member states. Maldives came eleventh, with 16 votes out of a possible 29. The U.K. topped the poll with 24 votes.

The Maldives government signed up to the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) in late 2005. It came into force in June this year.

Only 29 nations have joined so far, not including the United States. The Maldives is currently the only country in Asia to have ratified the Protocol, though Cambodia and Timor-Lester have signed up and are awaiting ratification.

The scheme establishes an international monitoring system to try to prevent torture of prisoners – the subcommittee will work with national organisations, like the Human Rights Commission, to try to achieve this.

The group’s powers will include the ability to make unannounced visits to jails, after which the subcommittee of diplomats will be able to make recommendations to the states signed up. But the body will not have the power to enforce its recommendations.

The government is upbeat about the organisation, calling it: “an historic day for the prevention of torture in the Maldives and around the world.”

In a press release it added: “The Government’s goal is to attain the very highest standards of torture prevention and we welcome international and national scrutiny of our progress towards that goal by the Subcommittee and the national preventative mechanism respectively.”

But the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) dismisses the government’s move as just a ploy to gain “international attention”.

Ameen Faisal, Shadow Defence Minister, says: “Very recently I have been out of [jail] and although they did not torture us, there are various people who have maybe not been physically tortured, but mentally yes.” He remains unconvinced by the government’s rhetoric.

A number of MDP leaders and members have been tortured in the past. They remain fiercely sceptical of the government’s claims to new found respect for human rights.

The ten states elected to the subcommittee were Argentina, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Mexico, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom and Uruguay.

The OPCAT was adopted by the United Nations on 18 December 2002 and formally entered into force, with the twentieth State ratification, on 22 June 2006. The Maldives was one of the 20 original members States of the OPCAT, having signed the instrument on 14 September 2005 and formally acceded on 15 February 2006.

The newly elected Subcommittee is expected to hold its first session in Geneva from the 19 to 23 February 2007.

The 29 States Parties to the OPCAT are: Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Georgia, Honduras, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Senegal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.