Use of torture since 1948

Through the Phoenix Program, the United States helped South Vietnam co-ordinate a system of detention, torture and assassination of suspected members of the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong.

The manuals were also distributed by Special Forces Mobile Training teams to military personnel and intelligence schools in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru.

The southern cone governments of South America – Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil – involved in Operation Condor co-ordinated the disappearance, torture and execution of dissidents in the 1970s.

[6] The United States government has, at least since the Bush administration, used the tactic of legal rendition in which suspected terrorists were extradited to countries where they were to be prosecuted for crimes allegedly committed.

In November 2005, the Washington Post reported — citing administration sources — that such facilities are operated by the CIA in Thailand (until 2004), Afghanistan, and several unnamed Eastern European countries.

[3] In 2020 more than 3000 Albanians signed a petition accusing the government of Edi Rama of torture against the Muslim cleric Genci Balla who was isolated under the article 41-bis prison regime in solitary confinement and deprived of halal food.

[38][39] In the socialist German Democratic Republic of divided Germany, torture and inhumane and degrading treatment were systematically used by security forces, including the Stasi secret police, against suspected opponents of the regime.

[61] Other notable victims include Behrouz Javid Tehrani,[62] Habibollah Latifi,[63] Houshang Asadi,[64] Saeed Malekpour,[65] Shirkoh (Bahman) Moarefi,[61] Hossein Khezri,[66] and Akbar Mohammadi.

[69] Torture techniques used in the Islamic Republic include: whipping, sometimes of the back but most often of the feet with the body tied on an iron bed; the qapani; deprivation of sleep; suspension from ceiling and high walls; twisting of forearms until they broke; crushing of hands and fingers between metal presses; insertion of sharp instruments under the fingernails; cigarette burns; submersion under water; standing in one place for hours on end; mock executions; and physical threats against family members.

Detainees reported kicking, slapping and punching; prolonged suspension from the wrists with the hands tied behind the back; electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, including the earlobes and genitals; and being kept blindfolded and/or handcuffed continuously for several days.

In several cases, the detainees suffered what may be permanent physical disability.Despite apparently credible claims that people were fed into Saddam Hussein's plastic shredder (most likely within Abu Ghraib) prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, no such device was found after the war.

Years later it emerged that she was the daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, and that the story was the creation of the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm employed by the Kuwaitis.

Dozens of witnesses and survivors stepped forward to testify to repeated, severe beatings, abuse of sexual organs, rape, death threats, injury by shooting, and the denial of food and water.

[87] Systematic torture was used in conjunction with military occupation in an attempt to quell anti-oil protests by the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta, according to a World Council of Churches report.

Guards have the power to inflict severe beatings, simulated drownings, stress positions, starvation, confinement in small spaces, hanging by the wrists or ankles, electric shocks, and sexual abuse.

Hanoi's Ministry of Public Security's Medical Office (MPSMO) was responsible for "preparing studies and performing research on the most effective Soviet, French, Communist Chinese and other ...techniques..." of extracting information from POWs.

Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said: "The reports of torture by Palestinian security services keep rolling in.

Methods include beatings with cables, pulling out nails, suspension from the ceiling, flogging, kicking, cursing, electric shocks, sexual harassment and the threat of rape.

[97] In 2012, after allegedly selling a house in Hebron to a Jewish family, Muhammad Abu Shahala was arrested by the Palestinian Authority, tortured into a confession, and sentenced to death.

"[99] In another report, Human Rights Watch "documents cases in which [Palestinian] security forces tortured, beat, and arbitrarily detained journalists, confiscated their equipment, and barred them from leaving the West Bank and Gaza."

[143][144] In a report entitled, "Make Him Speak by Tomorrow": Torture and other Ill-Treatment in Thailand[145] that was to have been formally released in Bangkok on 28 September 2016, Amnesty International accused the Thai police and military of 74 incidents of brutality.

A former British prison official in Kenya described a detention camp there in 1954: "Short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment, flogging – all in violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights."

[161]On 22 November 1954, Colonel Arthur Young sent a letter to Governor Evelyn Baring about the "inhumanity" of various parts of the security forces amid his investigations of wrongdoing: The other lamentable aspect of this case [i.e. Judgment of the East Africa Court of Appeal, Criminal Appeals 891 and 892 of 1954] is the horror of some of the so called Screening Camps which, in my judgment, now present a state of affairs so deplorable that they should be investigated without delay so that the ever increasing allegations of inhumanity and disregard of the rights of the African citizen are dealt with and so that Government will have no reason either to be embarrassed or ashamed of the acts which are done in its name by its own servants.

Moreover, the injured person is unlikely to appeal to the police for redress if they are to be regarded as subordinate to the Executive...I do not consider that in the present circumstances Government have taken all the necessary steps to ensure that in its Screening Camps the elementary principles of justice and humanity are observed.

[162]In January 1955, Baring sent a telegram to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Secretary of State for the Colonies and a cabinet minister, and told them that eight white European officers who had been accused of serious crimes, including accessory to murder, would be given immunity from prosecution.

Lennox-Boyd was told that one commander, Terrence Gavaghan, had developed the techniques at the Mwea camps in central Kenya – and he needed permission to treat the worst detainees in a "rough way".

[163]In June 1957, Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the British administration in Kenya, wrote to Baring, detailing the way the regime of abuse at the colony's detention camps was being subtly altered.

[180] On 13 March 2007, the six-month court martial of the seven soldiers – including Colonel Jorge Mendonca and Major Michael Peebles – over the detention of Iraqi prisoners in Basra during May 2003 ended with all but one, Corporal Donald Payne, being acquitted.

The BBC reported that "Labour MP Andrew Dismore, chairman of the committee, said he hoped the public inquiry [into the death of Baha Mousa] would give some indications as to why they were given 'wrong evidence'.

[189][190] The Chicago Police Department's Area 2 unit under Commander Jon Burge repeatedly used electroshock, near-suffocation by plastic bags and excessive beating on suspects in the 1970s and 1980s.