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Enhancing Internal Supervision of Detention Facilities

Internal supervision of detention facilities is a crucial safeguard to combat torture and other abuse in custody. Provincial governors and prosecutors have had a formal duty to monitor police stations since the 1980s. However Turkey’s appalling record on torture during the 1980s and 1990s indicates that they neglected this duty, leaving police and gendarmes to deal with detainees as they pleased without any external oversight. This provided the perfect conditions for torture.

Initial progress in opening up the inner workings of police stations came from outside the government: from 1990 onwards the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT, a Council of Europe body) began to conduct unannounced visits to detention facilities, and from 1998 to 2000 the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, under the presidency of Dr. Sema Pişkinsüt, also conducted an energetic program of police station visits. In the course of methodical investigations, the CPT and Dr. Pişkinsüt uncovered medical evidence of ill-treatment, secret interrogation rooms and instruments of torture. Their corroboration of the longstanding allegations made by victims and nongovernmental organizations was extremely valuable, but their principal achievement was to crack open the closed world of the police station. By the end of the 1990s, abusive interrogators could no longer feel quite so confident that they could carry on their business without intrusion.

In June 1999, the Office of the Prime Minister recognized the importance of supervision in maintainıng standards of behavior when it issued a circular requiring prosecutors and provincial governors to carry out impromptu visits to police stations and gendarmeries. The circular instructs governors and prosecutors to submit reports of these inspections to the justice, interior, and prime ministries every three months. The CPT considered this compliance monitoring procedure to be “of the greatest importance” and urged its “full and rigorous implementation.”⁷

Since there is no public reporting of this process, it is difficult to assess whether governors and prosecutors are diligent and probing in their investigations, or are merely performing a routine tour of the cells. In June 2004, the justice ministry made available a sample of twelve reports on police station visits conducted in 2003 and 2004. The reports provide welcome confirmation that such visits are actually taking place. In some cases, the visiting prosecutor had clearly gone to some trouble to assess the standard of compliance at the police stations, and some visits were reportedly unannounced.

The reports were not entirely satisfactory, however. Visits were conducted in the mid-afternoon, despite the fact that most allegations of torture and ill-treatment arise during the hours of darkness. References to irregularities in the custody book and shortcomings in prisoner accommodation lacked detail, and there was no indication that the visiting prosecutors were interviewing detainees. Moreover, a sample of reports cannot confirm that governors and prosecutors throughout Turkey are carrying out visits with sufficient frequency for all custody units to feel that they subject to a serious monitoring process.

It is essential that thorough and comprehensive internal monitoring visits are conducted throughout the country. To ensure that the visits actually contribute to improvements in police station management, it is also vital that the results are fed back to the relevant ministries and made public.

The revised Accession Partnership of May 2003, which lays out the European Commission’s expectations for Turkey to proceed with its candidacy, requires the government to “implement measures to fight against torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement officials, in line with … the recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture [CPT].”⁸

The CPT has recommended that police stations should be monitored by an independent body, and has made general recommendations about how this monitoring should be carried out: “visits …should be both regular and unannounced, and the authority concerned should be empowered to interview detained persons in private. Further, it should examine all issues related to the treatment of persons in custody: the recording of detention; information provided to detained persons on their rights and the actual exercise of those rights …; [and] compliance with rules governing the questioning of criminal suspects; and material conditions of detention.”⁹ The CPT considered Turkey’s internal compliance monitoring procedure to be “of the greatest importance” and urged its “full and rigorous implementation.”¹⁰ The internal monitoring system currently in place may have contributed substantially to the reduction in torture over the past five years, and even in its current shape the system seems to be valuable. Nevertheless, it is clear that the government could do more to ensure that this system works, and is seen to work, in practice, and that it complies fully with CPT recommendations.

Recommendation

To increase the effectiveness of the internal monitoring system, the government should produce a report every three months compiling information about the methods, frequency, and findings of such visits on a province-by-province basis. The reports should, at a minimum, indicate which police stations and gendarmes were visited and when, with as much detail as possible of the findings of those visits. Any report of serious failure such as irregularities in the custody book or obstruction of access to legal counsel should be accompanied by details of the remedial steps taken, including disciplinary measures.