Daily Times

In April 2012, an unconscious Malik Waqqar Ahmad was found dumped on Chandi Chowk in Rawalpindi. His mangled body, bearing marks of torture, was rushed to Holy Family Hospital. Nine days later, he died. He was 18 years old.

His family should have turned to the police. Only, they found out that their teenage son had been hanged from the ceiling, had his nails pulled out, red chilli thrown in his eyes and beaten with iron rods by two police constables in a torture cell in Pirwadhai. His crime? Demanding that his salary (he worked as a milkman) for the last 8 months be paid. His employer levied a stealing charge and had him picked up by the police at dawn.

Who do you turn to when those you turn to for protection are the ones you need protection from?

In Pakistan, torture at the hands of the police is widespread, systemic and rarely punished. Used as an instrument for collecting evidence, torture is considered a reasonable means of obtaining confessions in a police force that is resource-strapped, overburdened and underpaid.

Justice Project Pakistan and Yale Law School’s Lowenste in Clinic confirmed this pervasive culture of police brutality in a 2014 report Policing as Torture. Researchers examined 1,867 medical-legal certificates of independent physical examinations of criminal defendants from Faisalabad. The figures were striking; physicians found conclusive evidence of abuse in 1,424 of the 1,867 cases.

Police were documented as having “beaten victims, suspended, stretched and crushed them, forced them to witness other people’s torture, put them in solitary confinement, subjected them to sleep and sensory deprivation, confined them to small spaces, exposed them to extreme temperatures, humiliated them by imposing culturally inappropriate or unpleasant circumstances, and sexually abused them.”

That police torture takes place in Pakistan is commonplace knowledge. In recent years, there have been live broadcasts of police shooting and killing protestors, viral videos of constables beating detainees relentlessly, and photos of battered bodies of prominent political workers flashing across all major television networks. Nearly every day, the press will carry a story about deaths in police custody or officers being suspended for torture allegations.

In 2015, Dr Shahzad Butt, a medical-legal officer from Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre in Karachi too tried to create noise. His press conference dealt the police a double whammy; when officials told him to foil evidence of police torture, he refused and in a twist too serious for irony — he was tortured until he handed over his evaluation.

Just this week, reports have emerged of a 15-year-old being detained and beaten up by 5 policemen for 18 hours when a toy gun was found on his possession.

If there is outrage, it has been overshadowed by silence.

More privately, there have been funerals. Many a body has been returned to the earth with gashes, burns, bruises, cuts, without toe nails, but certainly broken bones. Their ordeal is often buried with them, in hasty inquiries and temporary suspensions.

Those that are lucky enough to survive police torture are often unluckier for it. Aftab Bahadur was one of them. 15 years old, orphaned and poor, Aftab was working as plumber’s apprentice when he was implicated for a murder. Despite not even being in the city at the time of the crime, he was named as the culprit. Upon finding zero evidence of his involvement, Aftab was taken by the police to the crime scene. They brutalized him, a 15-year-old child, until he put his oil-doused hand on a cupboard. He spent 22 years in jail until he was executed in 2015. Torture may not have killed him immediately, but it was certainly what took his life.

Since lifting the moratorium on the death penalty, Pakistan has executed 428 individuals from its 8000-strong death row. Many were likely there as a direct result of torture-induced confessions forming the basis of their conviction. But as Shafqat Hussain, wrote in his final letter, when being subjected to their brutality, “they could make you say a deer was an elephant.” He too, was executed for his false confession.

And yet, despite the repeated documentation of the routine reliance on torture over the last 35 years, genuine reforms have not taken root. While formal prohibitions against torture exist under Article 14 (2) of Pakistan’s Constitution, there is no law expressly criminalizing torture in the country. Similarly, the Pakistan Penal Code fails to define and specifically prohibit torture. Further, while the Code of Criminal Procedure provides that a confession obtained under police custody is inadmissible, courts routinely admit and rely on confessions made under duress.

If anything, the lack of safeguards at the arrest stage fosters a permissive environment for torture. The Constitution states that “every person who is arrested and detained in custody shall be produced before a magistrate within a period of twenty-four hours of such arrest.” In blatant contrast, police routinely detain individuals for days without even entering them into the system granting them the ability to abuse prisoners before bringing them before a magistrate. There is no independent state-sponsored mechanism for investigating or documenting allegations of torture. And so, custodial cruelty is rarely investigated and seldom punished.

In short, there exists an institutional culture in which torture and abuse of power are pervasive and tolerated and in similar vein the criminal justice system is worse off for it. Incongruently with its domestic realities, Pakistan has ratified the Convention Against Torture in 2010. Its performance comes under review next month. Our representatives can only hope that the ghosts of Aftab Bahadur, Shafqat Hussain and Malik Waqqar Ahmed do not come back to haunt them.

The writer works with Justice Project Pakistan, a human rights law firm based in Lahore