AN investigative report in this newspaper’s Sunday edition, pegged on Punjab, revealed the horrifying details of a practice that is widely believed to be endemic: the torture of convicts and undertrial prisoners in jails. The ordeal begins pretty much from the inmates’ first day in prison in a ritual known colloquially as the mulahiza, or inspection, which involves the first of many beatings. The report details one harrowing account after another by former inmates: from being forced into physical stress-inducing positions for hours on end, to beatings with an array of instruments, to being strung up, and much worse. Taken together, the prisoners’ accounts point to a wilful ‘institutionalised’ project to break the men down and perpetuate a jail culture of abuse, bribery, corruption and blackmail. Indeed, there is even compelling evidence that some jails have formalised torture cells or even whole blocks.

Torture in jails lurks behind high walls. Yet it is well known that at police stations and other detention centres across the country, torture is a routine weapon for extracting information and confessions. A good part of the guilt must be shouldered by the state, which has never formally outlawed torture through legal coda. The Senate passed the proposed Torture, Custodial Death and Custodial Rape Bill (Prevention and Punishment) Act, 2015, in March that year, but it was never passed by the National Assembly. In February this year, the Senate passed a resolution referring the legislation to a joint sitting of parliament, but nothing more was heard. And this sorry state of affairs persists even though Pakistan ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 2010. To start addressing these heinous issues, Pakistan urgently needs to formulate a law directly condemning torture and it perpetrators. Otherwise, the circle of abuse will never end: as one interviewee in the Dawn report pointed out, after a few years of being tormented, the prisoner himself becomes the tormentor.

Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2017