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Impunity

Jordan’s mechanisms to hold accountable those responsible for torture and ill-treatment or violations of prisoners’ rights are insufficient either to provide redress to victims of abuse or to deter perpetrators. The justice system does not effectively hold officials accountable for torture or ill-treatment, creating a climate of impunity. The lack of transparency and responsiveness to prisoner complaints also shows that the mechanism to address grievances is equally broken. Indeed, officials have repeatedly dismissed allegations by individuals or human rights organizations regarding violations of prisoner rights without starting a serious and transparent investigation.

The Convention Against Torture stipulates that states have an obligation to “proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed.”¹²⁵ Reasonable allegations of torture not just incontrovertible material evidence, are thus sufficient to launch an investigation. Furthermore, every person subjected to torture has “the right to complain to, and to have his case promptly and impartially examined by, [the] competent authorities. Steps shall be taken to ensure that the complainant and witnesses are protected against all ill-treatment or intimidation as a consequence of his complaint or any evidence given.”¹²⁶

Human Rights Watch heard accounts of over 60 prisoners alleging torture or ill-treatment in 2007.¹²⁷ In the cases we investigated, guards appear to have abused prisoners with near total impunity. This is in part because there is no independent body to hold them accountable. The Public Security Directorate (PSD), which is the agency that employs all prison staff, including guards and prison directors, is also the authority that investigates and prosecutes prison abuses by such staff. Police prosecutors under the PSD’s Legal Affairs department are responsible for bringing charges against their fellow officers in the prison administration. The PSD also convenes a special court, the Police Court, to which it appoints the judges; the Police Court tries all crimes involving PSD officials.¹²⁸ The PSD director can personally adjudicate criminal cases of misdemeanors carrying a prison sentence of less than three years.¹²⁹ Ordinary courts do not have jurisdiction of crimes committed by PSD officials. As can be expected, this internal prosecution mechanism has failed adequately to investigate and prosecute its own staff.

Deficient Complaints Mechanism

Prisoners have four ways to complain about mistreatment: formally to the director of the prison, often via the guards in their wards; to the PSD Legal Affairs prosecutors now present full-time in seven prisons; to the PSD’s Grievances and Human Rights Office during its regular visits, or by posting a complaint to its complaints box; or informally to external visitors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the National Center for Human Rights (NCHR), or their lawyers or visiting family members.

The lack of confidentiality in the formal complaints process, the lack of independence of the prosecutors, who appear in the same uniform as prison guards and report to the same authority, as well as fear of retaliation from prison guards, appears to dissuade prisoners from filing complaints of torture. In addition, prosecutors do not vigorously investigate the cases of abuse they are informed about by obtaining credible witness testimonies, but rely too heavily on incontrovertible forensic reports proving torture to pursue cases. Furthermore, the ability of prison directors to decide which cases of abuse to refer to prosecution and to “settle” cases internally by disciplining abusive guards also results in few cases of formal prosecution with criminal sanction for abusers.

The Grievances and Human Rights Office in 2007 received 710 complaints, of which “95 per cent were administrative complaints.”¹³⁰ Officials investigated 19 complaints of a potentially criminal nature, referred six to the Police Court for prosecution and decided not to refer five cases to court for prosecution for lack of evidence (see below for the outcome of prosecutions). Unit commanders disciplined officials in eight cases of misdemeanors or administrative transgressions without recourse to the courts. Between January and April 13, 2008, prison-based police prosecutors and Grievances Office prosecutors investigated only one case of alleged abuse.¹³¹ By August 2008, that number had risen to 24 cases.¹³²

The official 2008 PSD guide instructs prison directors, all of whom make regular visits to the wards, about the steps they must take when presented with a complaint. Formalizing the complaints procedure is a welcome step, but the guide underscores the lack of independence of the formal complaints mechanism: while the officer receiving the complaint must record each prisoner complaint in a register and give prisoners a copy of the filed complaint without checking the content, prisoners are supposed to present their complaints to the officer in charge of the prison wing, who also supervises the registry.¹³³ This officer, however, may well be the abuser.

In January 2008 the PSD assigned police prosecutors under its Legal Affairs department to seven prisons to more effectively investigate claims of crimes committed by prison personnel.¹³⁴ This is a significant step toward providing more localized and timely monitoring of prison abuses. Ideally, such a presence would send a strong deterrent signal to the prison guards. However, it is not clear that these prosecutors are always fulfilling their mandate to actively investigate any incidents of abuse.¹³⁵

For example, on a visit to Birain prison on April 15, 2008, the newly-assigned prosecutor there told Human Rights Watch that he had not had a single case of abuse against a prison employee.¹³⁶ Three detainees in the same prison, however, separately recounted to Human Rights Watch an incident of torture in early March, in which several guards had taken them and two other prisoners at night to a courtyard out of sight of the prison wings and beat them for about two hours, before suspending them cuffed to a metal bar for one hour because one prisoner caught trying to smuggle drugs into the prison had named them as co-conspirators.¹³⁷ The prison director was aware of the incident, but neither he nor the prosecutor had investigated the alleged abuse by the guards.¹³⁸

The number of investigations has increased since April. The director of the prison service, Sharif al-‘Umari, told Human Rights Watch in July 2008 that prison-based prosecutors had investigated 24 incidents of abuse in 2008, at least one in each of the seven prisons.¹³⁹

The PSD’s Grievances and Human Rights officials work closely with prison-based police prosecutors. They conduct their own prison visits every two weeks and empty a sealed mailbox for complaints located in an accessible area, like the dining hall.¹⁴⁰

Only Grievances officials are supposed to have the key to the complaints box. However, prisoners in Muwaqqar and Swaqa told Human Rights Watch that the prison staff have emptied the boxes and read the complaints with their own key.¹⁴¹ The PSD denied that this had occurred.¹⁴²

Informal complaints to outside visitors benefit from greater confidentiality, but do not generally lead to judicial investigations. The National Center for Human Rights (NCHR) can only refer cases it receives during visits or via telephone to the Grievances officials for judicial investigation or can decide to report publicly, but anonymously, on incidents of abuse.¹⁴³

 In the aftermath of the mass beatings of prisoners and riots in August 2007, the PSD on February 3, 2008 allowed the NCHR to open an office inside Swaqa prison, staffed every Monday, to receive complaints from prisoners. This new NCHR presence complemented the new prison prosecutors at the prison and visits from the Grievances Office.¹⁴⁴ However, PSD officials denied the NCHR’s request to visit Swaqa prison during disturbances there on April 15, 2008 and reneged on its promise to extend NCHR offices to other prisons, too.¹⁴⁵

One concern with the current complaints mechanism is its lack of confidentiality and the failure to protect complainants and witnesses. Prisoners told Human Rights Watch that they had not told police prosecutors from the Grievances Office all of what they told us.¹⁴⁶ Prisoners said they feared retaliation for telling the truth because the investigating prosecutors wear the same uniform and are administratively responsible to the same body as the prison official accused of misbehaving.¹⁴⁷

Prisoner Hazim told Human Rights Watch during a visit that “there is a 90 per cent chance that the prison guards will come in here after you leave, interrogate us about your questions, and punish us for talking to you.”¹⁴⁸ In all prison wings Human Rights Watch visited, prisoners were frank about informers among prisoners who relayed information to the administration in exchange for favors from the guards.¹⁴⁹ One prisoner in Juwaida said “I can’t tell everything that goes on here,” in a whispered comment repeated in other prisons.¹⁵⁰ Another prisoner in Swaqa, Ra’id, said that “when the [guards] came in to beat us, they taunted us, saying, ‘You think the ICRC is better than us, then, do you?’ While they were beating us, they said ‘Spit on the ICRC’.”¹⁵¹

Another reason for few complaints and the low number of investigations besides fear of retaliation may be the failure by the Grievances officials to protect complainants or witnesses. Prisoners told Human Rights Watch that prison guards emptied the complaints box and “punished the prisoner for complaining.”¹⁵²

In one incident of abusing witnesses instead of protecting them, guards and special forces beat witnesses and failed to remove threatening guards from contact with them.

Ziyad, a former detainee described the investigation into the Muwaqqar prison fire in April 2008: “The prosecutor came and asked us only why we cut ourselves up. Then they took us to the solitary confinement cells, and beat us on the way there. They put two of us to one cell.”¹⁵³ Fawzi, another former prisoner questioned in the same incident said “a civilian prosecutor came the second day after the incident to take my statement, but the clerk who wrote it down was a prison guard who looked at me intimidatingly.”¹⁵⁴ Fawzi also described beatings three days after the prison riot and fire:

On Thursday morning at 4 a.m. Team 14, Team 17, and the Rapid Intervention Forces came with a list of 120 prisoners. They handcuffed us in the back and took us to prisoner transport vans outside, with their faces masked, and four officers in front of us, and four behind. We were five to six prisoners per van, where they beat and insulted us and told us to say the right thing in the investigation. On the way back to the cell, one of them said, “There is no more [parliamentary] public freedoms committee, no more national center for human rights. We sent them away.”¹⁵⁵

International guidelines on investigating torture require that officials implicated in torture be removed from positions of control or power over witnesses:

Those potentially implicated in torture should be removed from any position of control or power, whether direct or indirect over complainants, witnesses and their families as well as those conducting investigations. Investigators must give constant consideration to the effect of the investigation on the safety of the person alleging torture and other witnesses. ¹⁵⁶

Lackluster Prosecutions

Problems with the complaints mechanism have produced fewer complaints than the incidence of torture and ill-treatment in Jordan’s prisons would warrant. Additional problems occur at the stages of investigation and prosecution. Overall, the number of prosecutions for physical or mental pain prison guards inflict on their charges is low compared to the widespread and routine use by guards of violence against inmates Human Rights Watch’s research in 2007 indicated.

One reason for fewer prosecutions is the provision of the Public Security Law allowing “unit commanders” such as prison directors of the militarily organized PSD to discipline subordinates for misdemeanors without trial.¹⁵⁷

Our research indicates that police prosecutors proceed to trial only where incontrovertible forensic medical reports indicating injuries consistent with physical torture exists. The office’s director told Human Rights Watch that in several cases of alleged abuse, he could not proceed with an investigation because the medical report did not specify that injuries were sustained as a result of ill-treatment.¹⁵⁸

Hospital doctors may not be specialized in detecting the effects of torture, including psychological torture, and the prisoner remains cuffed and in the presence of a prison guard in hospital, making it difficult for him to ask the doctor to examine signs of possible torture. All prisons have video monitoring of public areas, corridors, open spaces, entry and exit areas, and the space around the solitary confinement cells, accessible on screens from a separate control room and the prison director’s office. However, no routine recordings are made and preserved for some time to serve as potential evidence in cases of abuse, although the Ministry of Interior planned to do so in the future.¹⁵⁹

Grievances officials appear to make little effort to independently research conditions of abuse, for example by frequently and repeatedly visiting the wards to interview inmates as victims and witnesses in private and individually, speaking to prison doctors, or operating an anonymous complaints mechanism that prisoners trust. In the cases known to Human Rights Watch, prosecutors from the Grievances Office relied on a formal complaint before opening an investigation, and did not routinely research prison conditions.¹⁶⁰ Their biweekly prison visits are too infrequent to secure timely information to stop or document torture as it happens.

In 2007, officials investigated 19 complaints potentially indicating a crime out of 710 received, but referred only six to trial while internally settling five cases. Prison directors appear to receive more complaints of abuse but, without objection from police prosecutors, mete out mild disciplinary rebukes to abusive guards under their authority as unit commanders.

The directors of Muwaqqar, Qafqafa, and Swaqa prisons together told Human Rights Watch of 20 complaints of abuse they had received in the first seven and a half months of 2007 alone. They settled these cases internally, although the prosecutors were informed.¹⁶¹

Of the 24 cases the Grievances Office and prison-based police prosecutors investigated until August 2008, information on the outcome was only available for four cases that occurred in Salt prison. The Grievances Office had referred three cases to Legal Affairs prosecutors to pursue the prosecution at trial, and in one case had stopped the charges, the director of the Grievances Office told Human Rights Watch.¹⁶²

In some cases, Grievances officials failed to prosecute suspected guards, despite ample evidence of abuse. For example, the Office did not prosecute guards for the torture of all or nearly all Tanzimat prisoners in Swaqa and Juwaida of June and July 2007. These incidents did not feature among the reported 19 cases the Grievances Office investigated in 2007. When the Grievances Office visited Swaqa on August 27 in the wake of a separate riot there on August 22, its staff could have recorded allegations of abuse, and what some prisoners said were marks on their bodies from the torture they endured in June and July. Yet there appears to have been no investigation into these earlier incidents. The PSD did investigate and prosecute the August 2007 torture of Swaqa prisoners, but the results were disappointing (see below).

In April 2008, the Grievances Office and other PSD prosecutors conducted a lengthy investigation into the riot and prison fire resulting in three inmate deaths at Muwaqqar prison, but quietly concluded that no official had done anything wrong.¹⁶³ Human Rights Watch’s research into the Muwaqqar riot and fire in April 2008 showed that beatings and ill-treatment were the underlying reason for the riot on April 15, 2008 (See Appendix 3). The PSD in July 2008 strongly disagreed with our findings and we therefore carried out further research with eyewitnesses, who largely confirmed our findings.

The PSD disagreed that Firas al-‘Utti and Hazim Abu Ziyad had been tortured in the days prior to their deaths during the fire. New eyewitnesses came forward to say that ‘Amir al-Qutaish, the prison guard alleged to have abused them, took Firas out of his room on April 13 and cuffed him to the holding pen for a few hours before sending him to the solitary confinement cells.¹⁶⁴ Mundhir, Wadi’, and Jamal, all confirmed earlier accounts of guards beating inmates as they exited their burned out room, and one guard shooting one prisoner , Muhammad al-Tabbasha, with a rubber bullet. Wadi’ said, “We went into a large area, outside the buildings, but inside the prison walls and stayed there for four hours. Al-Tabbasha lay there like dead without medical assistance, surrounded by special forces in balaclavas with electric stun devices.”¹⁶⁵ These former prisoners also shed further light on why three prisoners burned to death in their room.¹⁶⁶

These former prisoners also reported problems with the PSD investigation. Mundhir said that “the prison director intimidated me before the release, telling me to affirm that Firas al-‘Utti [a prisoner who died in the fire], not the guards, beat me causing marks on my body. He told another prisoner in my presence to lie to investigators about which room he was in.”¹⁶⁷ Guards beat prisoners who had cut themselves up and put them into solitary confinement cells, two prisoners to a cell. They isolated the rest in an unused wing of the prison.¹⁶⁸

Police Court

The Police Court is not independent and averse to public scrutiny. Its verdicts reveal lenient sentences for torturing prison officials.

The PSD director appoints qualified police officers as its judges and prosecutors who try fellow officers. Jordan’s constitution and Public Security Law allows, but does not mandate, the establishment of this special court with jurisdiction over members of the Public Security Directorate for any crime, whether committed on or off duty.¹⁶⁹

The PSD points out that the Police Court adheres to the highest standards of justice, and its former head told Human Rights Watch that no one interfered in his work in the two years of his judgeship there.¹⁷⁰ Nevertheless, the leadership of the PSD could not convincingly answer why such a special court was necessary in the first place. The current head of the police court, Col. Muhammad al-Zu’bi, replied that it existed because it was prescribed by law.¹⁷¹

The court, which generally holds its trials openly, does not invite scrutiny. When Human Rights Watch visited the Police Court to obtain a copy of the verdict in the Zaidan case, court officers declined the request and told us to speak to the PSD’s information office.¹⁷² In a subsequent visit coordinated with the PSD, the chief of the Police Court, Muhammad al-Zu’bi, provided us with six verdicts of the six cases of alleged prison abuse concluded in 2007. However, only three were related to prison abuse, one from 2004, and the two 2007 cases of the mass beatings at Swaqa on August 22, 2007 and the beating to death of Firas Zaidan at Aqaba prison on May 9, 2007, and al-Zu’bi requested Human Rights Watch not mention the names of the convicted officers, which he had blanked out.¹⁷³ A court that is so ill-disposed to public disclosure of its work can hardly serve the cause of public justice by acting as a deterrent against crime.

The Jordanian media has not covered proceedings at the court in contrast to more extensive coverage of the State Security Court, a military dominated special court set up to try suspects accused of crimes against national security.¹⁷⁴

As described earlier, the August 2007 Swaqa case involved the prison director and a group of prison guards beating dozens of inmates before subjecting inmates to the forced shaving of their heads and beards.¹⁷⁵ Following its investigation into the incident, the prosecution charged the prison director and 12 other prison guards, including one Preventive Security officer, with “exercising unlawful authority resulting in harm,” according to Article 37.8. of the Public Security Law for having treated inmates in a manner not in accordance with instructions issued by the PSD.¹⁷⁶ The court did not charge the director with a crime under Jordan’s penal code, such as assault.

The evidence in the case consisted of forensic medical reports of injured inmates, statements of the accused and of prisoners who were witnesses, as well as a report by the National Center for Human Rights. The prison director personally participated in the beatings; he was found to have used an electric stun device, which is not among the PSD’s authorized weapons.¹⁷⁷ He confessed to having beaten prisoners, ordered their heads and beards shaved, and put some prisoners into solitary confinement. The remaining 12 officers confessed to the same things, but claimed they acted on orders of the director. The court accepted the evidence that the director had, in the words of one witness cited in the verdict, “gathered around 70 inmates and put them in the corridors and, together with a group of prison officials, beat them because they were the chiefs of the prison.” However, it found that the director had issued these orders “with good intention and with the motive of controlling the inmates,” and sentenced him to a fine of JOD120, or roughly US$180.¹⁷⁸

The court did not convict the other officials, accepting that they had followed orders and thus were not personally liable. While the court noted that Article 61.2. of Jordan’s penal code does not absolve a person of criminal responsibility for following “an unlawful order,” it argued that “the nature of the military system and the proper performance of one’s work constitutes an excuse for the guilty when considering the extent of the legality of the order” by the prison director.¹⁷⁹

This verdict reveals a great deal about the prison system: first, that prison officials may not recognize that beating prisoners is illegal and followed the order believing it to be legal; second, that the PSD’s instructions prohibiting beatings either had not reached their intended targets or were being ignored; third, that for prison officials obedience to one’s superiors is clearly more important than any perceived risks in committing a crime by carrying out the orders; and fourth, that there is no appropriate mechanism to protect officials who refuse to carry out unlawful orders, which the court could have cited had it existed. In its ruling, the court legitimized crimes committed by prison officials when they were following orders.

In another case, the prosecution and trial of five persons involved in the beating to death of inmate Firas Zaidan at ‘Aqaba prison in May 2007 was more thorough, but exhibits different problems. The prosecution did not fully investigate all guards involved, failed to protect witnesses, and the judges issued lenient sentences.

The court convicted two guards of beating Zaidan to death, but found a third guard innocent of these charges because of conflicting testimony of witnesses with long criminal records and never charged a fourth guard with intimidating witnesses. In a September 17, 2007 memorandum, Human Rights Watch conveyed to the prosecution the results of our interviews with eyewitnesses to the events, who clearly implicated the third and fourth guards as having participated in the deadly beatings and intimidating witnesses, respectively.¹⁸⁰The court sentenced two guards to two and a half years in prison with hard labor for “beatings resulting in death,” and the fourth guard to two months in prison for “neglect in carrying out duties.”¹⁸¹

The prosecution only upgraded charges of “neglect of duties,” “acting against orders,” and “abuse of power,” to “beatings resulting in death,” following Human Rights Watch’s consultation with leading psychiatrists in the United States, and interventions by the US embassy in Amman (Zaidan was engaged to a US citizen and his immediate family members are US citizens)and the Royal Palace.

Prosecutors based their initial charges on an early autopsy report that identified the cause of death as an extremely high dosage of Clomipramine, a chemical substance used in psychiatric medications, in Zaidan’s blood sample. Outside intervention resulted in a further autopsy finding Clomipramine levels within the therapeutic norm, and thus only a contributing cause of death.¹⁸²

In contrast to the verdict in the Swaqa case, the court in the Aqaba case found that the prison director had committed “neglect in carrying out duties,” in violation Article 37.6. of the Public Security Law for ordering Zaidan into solitary confinement without assessing his health. The director, who did not participate in the beatings, received a JOD120 (US$180) fine.¹⁸³ PSD director Maj.Gen. Mazin al-Qadi told Human Rights Watch he had personally appealed the sentence to the civilian Court of Appeals.¹⁸⁴

An earlier case from 2004 again shows the leniency of verdicts handed down to guards guilty of murder. In September 2005, the Police Court found 10 prison officials guilty of “beating resulting in death” of Abdullah al-Mashaqba, an inmate at Juwaida prison, in January 2004. The court sentenced them to five years in prison with hard labor, but immediately reduced by half the sentence because the prison guards “are in the prime of their youth, and to provide them with an opportunity to change their behavior in the future.”¹⁸⁵

Official Responses to Human Rights Reporting

Jordan’s successive governments have been among the most open to local and international human rights investigations in the region, but quickly dismiss as unfounded human rights criticism.¹⁸⁶  Jordanian officials increasingly have also recognized the need for speedy media responses to incidents such as prison riots.¹⁸⁷ For its transparency and willingness to engage on the issue of torture in Jordan’s prisons, the government is to be commended.

 Since 2007, however, the government has allowed markedly fewer prison visits by local human rights organizations. In 2006, the Arab Organization for Human Rights and the Public Liberties Committee of the Engineers’ Association had been able to carry out multiple visits to ordinary prisons.¹⁸⁸

Jordan’s openness toward independent human rights scrutiny contrasts with its reserved, even dismissive, attitude toward the findings of such organizations. Officials disparage human rights organizations, dismiss their findings, while their own investigations remain non-transparent internal affairs with unsatisfactory results.

The PSD’s public announcements following prison unrest have provided essential facts to the public, but at the same time have sometimes misrepresented the underlying reasons for the protests. The PSD publicly responded to prison riots in 2006 and 2007, announced the start of an investigation, but then did not inform the public about the proceedings or the results of the investigation.¹⁸⁹ The families of prisoners at times turned to human rights organizations for information.¹⁹⁰

In April 2008, the PSD spokesperson described the Muwaqqar riots as protests against the new segregation of convicted prisoners from those awaiting trial, when in fact separate investigations by the National Center for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch found that the overriding reason for the protests was ill-treatment. The head of the prison service, Sharif al-‘Umari, in an interview with al-Ghadd newspaper, criticized the NCHR report, saying organizations

speak about one side of the human equation, and that is human rights, and they put aside the other side, which is the response to [crimes] … The purpose of these reports is to cause disturbance and alarm, and their purpose is not humanitarian despite being human rights reports.¹⁹¹

Despite announcements in April and early May 2008 that the investigation into the Muwaqqar riots would conclude imminently, no results had been made public by late July.¹⁹² One person familiar with the inquiries said they had concluded by absolving all officials of wrongdoing and referring nine inmates to the regular courts on various charges related to the riots.¹⁹³

In another instance, the government ignored Human Rights Watch’s private account to the government about a riot at Swaqa prison that our researchers witnessed, choosing instead to misrepresent the events to the media. During our visit on August 26, 2007, we witnessed prisoners suffering from apparently self-inflicted injuries. We also recorded the accounts of 22 prisoners who described to us earlier mass beatings of prisoners on August 22, the day following our first visit. We immediately informed the PSD, the Ministry of Interior, and the National Center for Human Rights of both incidents—the mass beatings on August 21, and the self-inflicted injuries on August 26, clarifying that those injuries appeared to be a sign of protest against torture the prisoners had endured four days earlier but that prison officials had not investigated. Nevertheless, according to identical reporting in three major Jordanian daily newspapers, the government spokesperson the next day continued to claim that the Swaqa prisoners had “beaten themselves up so that they appeared to carry marks of being subjected to torture.”¹⁹⁴

In addition to misrepresenting underlying reasons for prison riots to the public, officials roundly dismiss as unreliable prisoner accounts of torture.¹⁹⁵ However, court documents in two instances show that witnesses separately interviewed by prosecutors and by Human Rights Watch gave similar accounts of torture.For example, on the occasion of Minister of Interior Eid al-Fayez’s visit to open Muwaqqar prison in April 2007, al-Ra’i newspaper quoted him as “stressing the importance of striving for accuracy in the reports of international organizations, which seek their information from untrustworthy sources.”¹⁹⁶ Almost one year later, during another prison visit, al-Fayez called on international organizations to “derive their information from trusted sources and not to rely on falsified sources.”¹⁹⁷

While such dismissals may be expected from government officials, Jordan’s parliamentarians and media are equally defensive of the security services. Aside from a few local human rights organizations, the PSD faces little scrutiny of its treatment of detainees.¹⁹⁸