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Spain: UN Convention on Torture (Optional Protocol) ratified as claims of ill-treatment continue

01 March 2006

The Spanish foreign affairs minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, filed Spain's ratification instrument of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture in New York on 4 April 2006, almost a year after it was signed by Spain on 13 April 2005. The Optional Protocol (art.1) seeks to establish a

system of regular visits undertaken by independent international and national bodies to places where people are deprived of their liberty, in order to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

This would involve the establishment of a Sub-Committee on Prevention in the UN Human Rights Committee whose members would be elected for four-year terms:

among persons of high moral character, having proven professional experience in the field of the administration of justice, in particular criminal law, prison or police administration or in the various fields relevant to the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty (art.5.2).

It would be responsible for visiting places of detention, issuing recommendations and giving advice to national authorities. At a national level, the Protocol requires signatories to establish "one or several independent national preventive mechanisms for the prevention of torture at the domestic level" (art.17), whose "functional independence" they must guarantee (art.18.1). It must be given "necessary resources" to conduct their work (art. 18.3) and must be allowed unlimited access to information, detention establishments, and the possibility to interview any detainee it chooses (art. 20).

To come into force, the Optional Protocol required 20 countries to ratify it, a threshold that was reached on 23 May 2006 when Honduras and Bolivia submitted their ratification instruments, meaning that it will come into force a month later, on 23 June. Of the 25 EU member states, only six have ratified it (Denmark, Malta, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK) out of the 17 that have signed the protocol (the last one was Portugal in February 2006), whereas eight others have neither signed nor ratified the Optional Protocol (namely Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia).

The signing of the Optional Protocol by Spain was welcomed by the Coordinadora por la prevención de la tortura (Cpt, a coalition of 41 civil society groups campaigning on the issue of torture in Spain, including one from Portugal), which had been pressing for Spain to sign and ratify the Optional Protocol. During a series of public events on torture organised by the coalition in February 2006, one of its representatives, Jorge del Cura, stressed the importance of the national mechanism resulting from the Protocol coming into force being independent, rather than being based on "political appointment". In response to the ratification, the Cpt issued a statement noting that "The entry into force of this Protocol must turn into an important mechanism to achieve the eradication of torture in the Spanish state...". It stressed the need for the prevention mechanisms "at a national and local level that it envisages to be real", rather than a mere declaration of intent, and noted that recommendations by UN bodies monitoring compliance with guidelines for the prevention of torture have largely been ignored in the past. The statement includes recommendations for the eradication of torture, largely based on those issued by the Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven, in February 2004.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak published a report in February 2005 in which he mentions some shortcomings in the Spanish authorities' follow-up of the recommendations made by van Boven, (see "The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture criticises the undermining of the non-refoulement principle and the use of terrorism as a pretext to justify torture", Statewatch news online, November 2004) to eradicate torture following his last mission to Spain in<