Human Rights Watch - Torture - Abuse of Detainees - Iraq

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Human Rights Watch > Torture and Abuse > U.S. Torture and Abuse of Detainees

Guantanamo - Five Years Later

"Totrure: A Human Rights Perspective" is the first book to critically assess torture from a global human rights viewpoint

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Iraqis wait for information about relatives detained at Abu Ghraib prison, May 14, 2004

Documents

Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Detainees in Iraq

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Geneva Conventions

The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Second Periodic Report of the United States of America to the Committee Against Torture

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

U.S. Torture and Abuse of Detainees

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep—in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated.

This must end. Torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices should be as unthinkable as slavery. U.S. Department of Defense officials have announced that certain stress interrogation techniques will no longer be used in Iraq. But President Bush should ban all forms of abuse during interrogation in Iraq and everywhere else that the United States holds people in custody. It is wrong in itself and leads to further atrocities.

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