Appendix V: Medical Report on the Defendants in the Sidi el-Bernoussi Case

In four of the six cases featured in this report, the defendants claimed that the police had tortured them while under interrogation. In a fifth case (Seddik Kebbouri and his co-defendants), defendants claimed that the police had slapped and threatened them.  In only one case, the one involving members of the 20th February Youth Movement, did the court order a medical examination to search for evidence of physical abuse. The examination was important not only to check whether possible crimes of violence had been committed against persons in custody, but also to shed light on whether the defendants’ confessions were voluntary as required by law for the court to admit them as evidence.

The medical examination in this case appears to have been superficial and well below international norms governing forensic examinations for torture.  The physician produced a report of a single page covering all six of the defendants, reproduced below.  We follow that report with an assessment of it by Dr. Duarte Vieira, who heads Portugal’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine, served as president of the International Academy of Legal Medicine from 2007 to 2012, and served as the medical expert in the team that accompanied the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture on his mission to Morocco and Western Sahara in September 2012.

Medical Report of the Six Defendants by the Examining Doctor

Communication from Dr. Duarte Vieira to Human Rights Watch [138]

I have been asked … to comment on the medico-legal report (“constat medical”) on Mr. Youssef Oubella, Abderrahmane Assal, Nouressalam Kartachi, Samir Bradli, Tarek Rouchdi, and Laila Nassimi, issued in Casablanca, on 25 July 2012, by Dr. Saïd el-Kadili.These are the comments that result from my evaluation of the report:

1. There is no indication of the length of time that the medical examination took (no start time and no finish time).

1. There is no indication that the examined persons gave their informed consent to the medico-legal examination and for a single medical report covering all of them simultaneously.

1. There is no indication about the existence or non-existence of restrictions and constraints placed upon the medical examination.

Apart from the signature of the medical doctor who conducted the examination there is no indication if someone else was present during the medical examination and if the medical examinations were done separately (as they should have been done) or together.

1. Overall, the report is extremely brief, with the substantive part only 8 lines long. For a medico-legal report concerning alleged cases of ill-treatment or torture this is unreasonably short, and itself is an indication that a thorough evaluation cannot really have taken place.

1. The report does not state the allegations of the different persons submitted to examination.

1. The results of the physical examination are provided in a single sentence: “l´examen clinique ne révèle en général rien de particulier à part quelques signes subjectifs ; pas de traumatisme, autrement à part Samir Bradli qui présente une trace du cuir chevelu type écorchure superficielle et l´examen clinique ne révèle rien de particulier ” … [139]
2. There are no supporting body diagrams or photographs and there is no description of the precise anatomical location and nature of the only wound mentioned.

1. The meaning of the phrase “quelques signes subjectifs” is not clear.

1. There is no description of eventual psychological symptoms nor any referral of any of the examined persons for further psychological evaluation by a specialist.

1. There is no attempt in the report to elicit any details whatsoever about the alleged acts that led the examined persons to the “constat medical” and no remark about their complaints.

1. There is no attempt to obtain or to document any precise details of the alleged ill-treatment or torture, nor any precision in identifying the parts of the body that were targeted.

In conclusion, the medico-legal report issued by Dr. Saïd el-Kadili falls well below internationally accepted practice for the medical examination of alleged victims of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as detailed in the Manual on the Effective Investigation andDocumentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, published by the United Nations in 2001 and known as the Istanbul Protocol.

The report… provides no details of the examinations conducted, and provides only a very undetailed and non-scientific description of the findings of these examinations.

With this degree of brevity, there is no indication at all that a thorough evaluation of the victims’ allegations has been conducted…. No judicial decision can rely on such an unacceptable report, which has no forensic value.