bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Peter Kammerer

Sri Lankan human rights advocate Father Reed Shelton Fernando has witnessed arrests before, but none quite like the one in front of his eyes in Mongkok on Monday.

Joining curious onlookers, he peered down from the walkway between the KCR and MTR stations and saw two  policemen struggling with a young man on the pavement.

The Catholic priest leaned on the railing and stared: five years of campaigning against police torture of prisoners in his country had him intrigued as to how law enforcement was carried out elsewhere. He was unprepared for what happened next.

Quickly, the man was overpowered and  his hands cuffed behind his back; then he was lying on the ground on his front, one of the policemen kneeling beside him and calming him with pats on the back and softly spoken words.

It was a revelation for Father Fernando.

'If this had happened in Sri Lanka, it would have been a very violent incident,' he observed. 'The police would have fired shots from their guns here and there and if the man had resisted arrest, blows would have rained down on him - he would have been attacked.

'Instead, here it was all over so calmly - the police vehicle came and the man quietly walked up to it and got inside. It drove away.

'This simply would not have happened in my country.'

What happens between Sri Lankan police and those they detain was the reason Father Fernando was in Hong Kong. As the convener of a coalition of six Sri Lankan groups  known as People Against Torture, yesterday he helped the Asian Human Rights Commission and its sister organisation, the Asian Legal Resource Centre, launch two reports and a book detailing a worrying catalogue of cases. They will be presented to the United Nations' Committee Against Torture in Geneva on November 17 and 18.

The committee will consider Sri Lanka's compliance with the main international treaty on the issue, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

In their submission to the committee, the Hong Kong-based rights groups claim that there is 'an absence of effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent torture in Sri Lanka'.

'Key institutions which are to uphold the rule of law, namely, the police, prosecution and the judiciary, have effectively collapsed in Sri Lanka and there needs to be an urgent and serious attempt to rebuild them,' it says. 'The breakdown of the state justice machinery has been caused by the malfunctioning policing system, where command responsibility is treated as a trivial matter and the underlying problem is the inability ... to uphold the rule of law.'

Sri Lankan  police are accused of operating unprofessionally, often like 'thugs or gangsters', and this is displayed 'through abuse, use of violence and torture', generally to elicit confessions to 'solve' cases.

The  submission's key recommendations to the committee are to ensure the Sri Lankan government enacts a witness protection law, creates a permanent special body to investigate torture, swiftly enforces the public complaints procedure of the National Police Commission and establishes the command responsibility of senior police officials on torture committed by their subordinate officers.

Leafing through the reports explains why Father Fernando found the incident in Mongkok so refreshing: they document more than 150 cases in which people who have been arrested have been brutalised. There are incidents of rape, deaths in custody and children being tortured.

In one, a 31-year-old father of two was taken from his home to a police station in February last year and accused of possessing bombs and other weapons. He was allegedly beaten 80 times with a cricket bat and another detainee, who was said to have tuberculosis, was forced to spit into his open mouth.

Then there is the case of Gerald Pierera, who was also allegedly tortured in custody but managed to get the incident taken to court: he was shot dead by unknown assailants last November, just before he was to testify against the police.

For Father Fernando, 62 later this month, the tragedy is that Sri Lanka signed  the torture convention and put in strong laws to back it up but  is failing to enforce them.

That was why he decided to channel his energies into helping investigate cases, document them and pass the evidence to the Hong Kong rights groups to pressure for change.

'Until we started our activities, nobody had been found at fault on the law,' he explained. 'Now 106 policeman have been suspended and 53 charged, although only one has been found guilty.'

A priest for 35 years, he said he first became interested in human rights while studying theology in Belgium and Brazil in the 1980s. Soon after returning to Sri Lanka in 1987, he began sheltering Catholic university students accused by authorities of being communist sympathisers.

He helped form an action group with other priests and his pastoral work evolved to helping the disadvantaged. Increasingly, that meant police torture victims, who tended to be the poorest people in society.

Father Fernando said that although his work was in addition to his pastoral duties and not sponsored by the church, he felt it was closely tied to religious teachings.

'I see it as part of my work as a churchman,' he said. 'There is a link - I see the spirituality. My preaching  in the church is always linked to the issue of human rights and the maintenance of human dignity. Human rights is part of my religion.'



Priest crusades for victims of torture and oppression