How many people are tortured a year

Last year international arrest warrants were issued for Ali Mamlouk, a former national security head, and Jamil Hassan, a former leader of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. German police arrested two former Syrian secret service officers in February on suspicion of involvement in torture and crimes against humanity, the first time western criminal prosecutors have arrested alleged torturers working for Assad.

This article is more than 2 years old. More than 14, people thought to have been tortured to death by regime during war Warning: graphic information in this report may upset some readers.

An Amnesty reconstruction of the high-security Saydnaya prison near Damascus in Syria. Photograph: DigitalGlobe — copyright Torture is psychological as well as physical. Torturers often focus on ways of inflicting grave pain that never leave a mark on the flesh: forced nakedness and sexual humiliation, stress positions, sleep deprivation, sensory overload, sensory deprivation and mock executions are among some of the horrific methods used to inflict torment.

From a medical and psychological perspective , these abuses constitute torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Torture is used to control communities and families. When one person is taken and tortured, the family learns immediately to be afraid, to be silent. When a second person is tortured, the community quickly gets the message: you must do whatever the perpetrators want. Torture takes control swiftly. Torture creates such a climate of fear and insecurity that it fractures communities, silences dissent and suppresses civic engagement.

The torture of families in their homes is heinous and devastating. For three decades, survivors have been describing torture scenarios to CVT that have nothing to do with interrogations, only with instilling terror, inflicting pain, enacting revenge and enforcing forms of slavery.

Men, women and children are all affected; in fact, over half of the survivors CVT cares for are women or girls. Even children are tortured. This can be difficult to accept, but the fact is CVT clinicians work in many locations with children who have been tortured or survived war atrocities. In some cases, perpetrators capture children to force their parents to turn themselves in.

In other cases, children are present when homes or buildings are raided, and they are singled out for torture. Parents describe watching their children being tortured thus reinforcing the powerlessness of the parents to protect their children as even more excruciating than their own torture. As many as 1. As the global refugee crisis grows, with This is as many as 1. Our specialist doctors use medico-legal reports to provide independent evidence of torture to people seeking asylum in the UK.

Using data from those reports, we can see worrying trends of torture in certain countries across the world. Despite being a top holiday destination, over the past 10 years, Sri Lanka has consistently been the country from where we receive the most clients.

It was hoped that the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in would mean the end of human rights violations in the country. Torture continues to be rife in the country, however, including ongoing torture of Tamils allegedly in a security context. Everyone could say there is a new government, but there have only been a few changes of faces at the top.

Rape, torture and kidnapping are still happening, nothing has changed. Read more about torture in Sri Lanka. In Iran, torture and other human rights abuses are used by the government to sow fear among the population, suppress political activity, force confessions and act as punishment. We have evidence that since the Cultural Revolution of , torture has been used by the state to control a broad range of political, religious and social activity. Our evidence shows that torture in Afghanistan is used frequently by state actors largely to attain information regarding the Taliban or links to the Taliban.

However, our records reveal a terrifying reality as they show an equal number of Afghanis have been tortured by militant groups like the Taliban for either refusing orders or refusing to join them. Most of the Afghan clients seen by Freedom from Torture are children or young people.

Despite the commitments made by the government to adhere to the Optional Protocol of the Convention against Torture, much work is needed to be done to eradicate the practice. For decades, President Isaias Afewerki has led Eritrea with an iron fist. There is no legislature, no non-governmental organisations or media outlets or even a judiciary.

There is a harsh system of conscription which sees every Eritrean serve for an indefinite period often lasting around 10 years. Whilst in service, Eritreans are subjected to treatment which has been characterised as enslavement and attempts to avoid national service has led to imprisonment and torture.

We have evidence that women and men exercising their rights to participate in political or human rights activism have frequently been detained and tortured by the state to silence any political opposition. Read more about torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was woken from sleep for the purpose of the rape and taken out of the room she was detained in.

She thinks that three different soldiers were involved and she would be raped by two of them at any one time. She was pushed onto her knees and raped vaginally and anally. She was also raped orally. There have been a variety of human rights abuses permitted by the former Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir over his year rule. In particular, we have evidence of torture committed from after the Darfuri war under the premise of non-Arab ethnic cleansing.

More recently, protests in early calling for Omar al-Bashir to step down led to a new torrent of oppression with government forces detaining, torturing, and killing scores of civilians. Since then, al-Bashir relinquished power and the military council formed a transitional government with the main opposition coalition.