Afghanistan’s internal security service and police use torture and other abusive methods to extract confessions from suspected insurgents held in a number of detention centres around the country, according to a new report by the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.Interviews with 379 detainees at 47 facilities over the past year found “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” at a number of centres, the study says.
It says 46 per cent of the detainees it spoke with recounted some sort of torture or abuse, but also noted that the Afghan government co-operated with its inquiry and neither sanctioned nor defended the abuse of prisoners.
The UN report raises questions about the capacity of Afghanistan’s fledgling government institutions to absorb the reams of human-rights laws that the country adopted under foreign tutelage in the past six years.