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5.1 TYPES OF TORTURE AND OTHER ILL-TREATMENT IN INTERNMENT CAMPS
from "Like We Were Enemies In a War" China’s Mass Internment, Torture and Persecution of Muslims in Xinji
The revised UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) provide that permitted instruments of restraint should be used only as strictly necessary and proportionate to prevent harm to the individual being restrained or to others, or as necessary to prevent escape during transfer; they are not to be used for punishment.480 The rules also prohibit the use of chains or irons and regulate the use of other restraints.481
It is essential that detainees be kept in conditions that ensure their physical and mental well-being. They should not be kept in overcrowded conditions or subjected to extremes of heat or cold. They must have access to natural light and fresh air482 and to exercise, recreational, religious, and other facilities. Rule 44 of the Mandela Rules defines solitary confinement as “the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact”. International standards and experts increasingly favour restriction or even elimination of solitary confinement, in particular as a punishment.483 Depending on the specific reason for its application, conditions, length, effects, and other circumstances, solitary confinement can constitute torture or other ill-treatment.484 Though China ratified the CAT in 1988, it has failed to bring domestic legislation in line with the obligations of the treaty. The Committee Against Torture, the UN expert body charged with overseeing the treaty’s implementation, has repeatedly raised concerns about a number of issues in China, including the following: arbitrary detention where there is a high probability of torture and other ill-treatment; torture and other ill-treatment of human rights defenders; lack of a definition of torture in domestic laws that accords with that of the CAT; failure to effectively exclude at trial evidence obtained through torture and other ill-treatment; and lack of independence of judges and lawyers.485
Every former detainee Amnesty International interviewed was tortured or subjected to other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment (in this report referred to as torture and other illtreatment) during their internment. Torture and other ill-treatment are constitutive elements of life in the internment camps. The torture and other ill-treatment that detainees experience in the camps falls into two broad categories.
The first category includes the physical and non-physical (that is, mental or psychological) torture and other ill-treatment experienced by all detainees as a result of the cumulative effects of daily life in the camps. This treatment includes:
being made to sit, kneel, or stand in stress positions for hours every day; sleep deprivation; and insufficient food, water, exercise, healthcare, sanitary and hygienic conditions, fresh air, and exposure to natural light.
Opposite page: A detainee is beaten by internment camp guards while immobilized in a tiger chair.
480 The Nelson Mandela Rules, rules 43(2), 47; see also UN Committee against Torture, Observations on the UN Standard Minimum Rules, arts, 36 and 37 (“The use of restraints should be avoided or applied as a measure of last resort, when all other alternatives for control have failed and for the shortest possible time, with a view to minimizing their use in all establishments and, ultimately, abandoning them… Immobilization should only be used as a last resort to prevent the risk of harm to the individual or others”); Amnesty International, Combating torture and other ill-treatment: a manual for action (Index: POL 30/4036/2016), pp. 57 – 58. www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ POL3040362016ENGLISH.PDF; Robben Island Guidelines, 2008: www.achpr.org/public/Document/file/Any/rig_practical_use_book.pdf 481 Rules 47, 48 of the Standard Minimum Rules. 482 The Nelson Mandela Rules, Rules 13, 14 and 23; CPT Standards, CPT/Inf/E (2002) 1 - Rev. 2015, p. 25, §30. www.un.org/en/ga/search/ view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/175 483 Amnesty International, Combating torture and other ill-treatment: a manual for action (Index: POL 30/4036/2016), Chapter 4.5.5, www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL3040362016ENGLISH.PDF 484 Special Rapporteur on torture report, UN Doc. A/66/268 (2011) §80. 485 Amnesty International, No End in Sight: Torture and Forced Confession in China, 2015, www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ ASA1727302015ENGLISH.PDF
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This category also includes various forms of psychological abuse, including:
“re-education” under threat of severe punishment itself; not knowing when their detention will end; not being able to communicate freely with their family or anyone outside the camp; not being able to speak in their native tongue; living under the constant threat of violence and other abuse; and being made to see and hear other detainees being tortured or otherwise ill-treated.
The combination of these physical and non-physical measures, in conjunction with the total loss of control and personal autonomy in the camps, is likely to cause mental and physical suffering severe enough to constitute torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
The camps are in fact designed to ensure that these types of torture and other ill-treatment are an inescapable aspect of daily life for every detainee. The overall environment and setting in the internment camps leads to a total absence of any safeguards against torture or other ill-treatment, which in itself is a violation of a state’s duties to protect and prevent people deprived of their liberty from violations of the absolute prohibition of such treatment in international human rights law.
The second category of torture and other ill-treatment includes physical torture and other illtreatment that occurs during interrogations or as punishment for misbehaviour by specific detainees (this type of torture is detailed in section 5.2). Torture methods used during interrogations and as punishment included beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, the unlawful use of restraints (including being locked in a tiger chair), sleep deprivation, being hung from a wall, being subjected to extremely cold temperatures, and solitary confinement. Amnesty International documented one account of a death in an internment camp caused by torture.
Amnesty International interviewed many former detainees who were tortured or subjected to other ill-treatment during interrogations or punishments in internment camps. Amnesty also interviewed former detainees who witnessed the torture or other ill-treatment of other detainees or spoke with other detainees – usually their cellmates – who informed them that they had been tortured or otherwise ill-treated during interrogations or as punishment.
Former detainees and witnesses described a broadly consistent pattern of treatment of detainees by staff and officials in the camps. Some of this treatment reflects patterns of torture and other ill-treatment that Chinese security forces have carried out in Xinjiang and other parts of China for decades, such as severe beatings, forced “confessions”, being shackled or cuffed for extended periods of time, and being punished in a tiger chair.486 According to former detainees, the torture and other ill-treatment was carried out both by camp guards and by domestic security police officers (Guobao) who came to the camps for the purposes of interrogating detainees.487
The treatment of detainees during interrogations and punishments in internment camps documented in this report constitutes torture and other ill-treatment, in violation of international law. It also constitutes the crime against humanity of torture (see section 7.1).
486 Amnesty International, No End in Sight: Torture and Forced Confession in China, 2015, www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ ASA1727302015ENGLISH.PDF; Human Rights Watch, Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses: Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China,” 2015, www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/china0515_web.pdf; UN Committee against Torture, Concluding Observations and Recommendations to China, A/48/44(SUPP) paras. 387-429, January 1, 1993; UN Committee against Torture, Concluding Observations and Recommendations to China, A/51/44(SUPP) paras. 138-150, January 1, 1996; UN Committee against Torture, Concluding Observations and Recommendations to China, CAT A/55/44 (2000) paras. 123-130, January 1, 2000; UN Committee against Torture, Concluding Observations and Recommendations to China, CAT/C/CHN/CO/4, December 12, 2008. 487 Amnesty International interviews.
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