9 October 2011 Last updated at 03:49 GMT

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UN urges ban on solitary confinement

Juan Mendez said the majority of countries abused the practice of solitary confinement Continue reading the main story

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'Enhanced interrogation is ineffective' UN issues Afghan 'torture' report

The UN's lead investigator on torture has called for governments to end the use of long spells of solitary confinement in prison.

Juan Mendez said such isolation could cause serious mental and physical damage and amount to torture. He said it should not be used on people with mental disabilities or juveniles. Mr Mendez said short term isolation was permissible for prisoner protection but all solitary confinement longer than 15 days should be banned. He told a UN General Assembly human rights committee that solitary confinement as practised in a majority of countries was "subject to widespread abuse". Mr Mendez, a professor of law at American University in Washington, cited studies indicating harmful physical and mental effects after just a few days of solitary confinement. "Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pre-trial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles," he said. "Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, supermax, the hole, secure housing unit... whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by states as a punishment or extortion technique." He said it was estimated that in the US, 20-25,000 prisoners were being held in isolation. Mr Mendez also criticised Chinese authorities for keeping a woman in isolation for two years out of an eight-year sentence for supplying state secrets to foreigners.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9617000/9617346.stm

10 October 2011 Last updated at 13:24 GMT

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UN publishes Afghanistan prisoner 'torture' report

The report prompted Nato to suspend detainee transfers to eight facilities last month Continue reading the main story

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Prisoners in some Afghan-run detention facilities have been beaten and tortured, a UN report has said. It says detainees in 47 facilities in 24 provinces run by the Afghan Directorate of Security and National Police have suffered abuses.

The allegations contained in the report were first revealed by the BBC in September. At that time the government denied torture claims and said the report was politically motivated. The published report says prisoners were mostly subjected to interrogation techniques that constituted torture under international and Afghan law. But the UN made clear that the mistreatment was not the result of government policy. Based on interviews with 379 prisoners, the report said that many inmates appeared to display visible signs of injuries and marks which suggested that they had been badly beaten or abused. The intelligence service is also accused of systematically practising torture at a number of its facilities to extract confessions from prisoners suspected of having links to the Taliban or other militant groups. Children as young as 14 were among those being held and subjected to torture. The report says that torture methods used included suspending people by their wrists, administering beatings to the soles of their feet, electric shocks, twisting detainees' genitals, removing toe nails and putting people in stress positions. It says that the Afghan authorities have taken steps to stop the abuse, including the reassignment of personnel and the suspension of individuals suspected of more serious offences. Significantly, the report says some of those detained had been handed over to the Afghans by international forces. Nato has now stopped prisoner transfers to 16 facilities as a result of the findings and says it is monitoring the situation. There has been no reaction from the Afghan authorities so far, but last month the government rejected the allegations. Kabul said the report was aimed at disrupting the handover of control of security back to Afghans as foreign troops prepare to leave by 2014.

U.N. torture sleuth urges end to long solitary terms

By Patrick Worsnip
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. torture investigator called on nations on Tuesday to end lengthy solitary confinement in prisons, saying it could cause serious mental and physical damage and amount to torture. Solitary confinement is practiced in a majority of countries for reasons ranging from punishment to protection of prisoners from fellow inmates but is subject to widespread abuse, said Juan Mendez, U.N. special rapporteur on torture. "It can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pretrial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles," he told the U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee. "Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, supermax, the hole, secure housing unit ... whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by states as a punishment or extortion (of information) technique," Mendez said. Citing studies showing a significant number of people would experience serious health problems and that some lasting mental damage was caused by just a few days of isolation, he said all solitary confinement longer than 15 days should be banned. He defined solitary confinement as an inmate being held in isolation from all except guards for at least 22 hours a day. Mendez told reporters he conceded that short-term solitary confinement was admissible under certain circumstances, such as the protection of lesbian, gay or bisexual detainees or people who had fallen foul of prison gangs. But he said there was "no justification for using it as a penalty, because that's an inhumane penalty." Mendez disputed the use of solitary confinement on national security grounds, citing the case of a woman in China who was isolated for two years of an eight-year sentence imposed for supplying state secrets to foreigners.

In a written report submitted to the General Assembly, he also described as "problematic" the use of super maximum security jails where solitary confinement is routine. He cited the United States, where he said between 20,000 and 25,000 people are being held in isolation. Referring to Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking secret documents to WikiLeaks, Mendez told journalists there had been a "big improvement" in his detention since he was moved to Fort Leavenworth military base in Kansas after eight months in solitary at a military brig in Virginia. Mendez had sought a meeting with Manning, who is awaiting a court martial, but they failed to persuade U.S. authorities to let them speak privately. Mendez said he planned to issue a report on Manning and other cases in the next few weeks. Mendez also criticized the holding of pretrial detainees in solitary, which he said was common in Denmark. While this could be justified for short periods, it needed to be strictly controlled, he said. Mendez, a law professor at American University in Washington, said three days he himself spent in solitary confinement under military rule in his native Argentina in the 1970s "were the three longest days in my life." (Editing by Eric Walsh) Copyright 2011 Reuters

A Point of View: Why euphemism is integral to modern warfare

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Continue reading the main story

Wonderful wind turbines (Will Self) Prisons don't work (WS) A herd mentality (WS) The power of the 'black dog' (JG)

The arms trade, and the UK's role within it, relies on business-speak and foggy language, writes Will Self. One of my favourite cartoons was published by the New Yorker magazine way back in the early 1980s. It shows some soignee types consorting - their diaphanous gowns suggest that they're divine, their cocktail glasses that they're merely sophisticated. The location for this party is one of those chimerical realms that only the sparse pen-and-wash of a first-class cartoonist can summon up - it could be Mount Olympus, but it could just as easily be the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Anyway, a svelte, gowned female is introducing another more robust, gowned male to a third partygoer, while announcing, "I believe you know Mars, god of defence."

Euphemism - along with its kissing cousin, jargon - is integral to modern warfare - indeed, it's difficult to imagine a conflict in recent years that hasn't spawned its own little lexicon of obfuscation designed to sanitise the miserable and sickening business of uniformed young men eviscerating one another with high explosive, while drawing a veil over the so-called "collateral damage" wreaked upon civilians.
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The Response
The Response will be an occasional series highlighting reactions to viewpoint pieces. If you wish to be considered for inclusion please use the box at the bottom of the story. Comments for publication on the day should use the alternative discussion forum provided. Recent wars have been prosecuted by means of "surges", "operations", and "tactical strikes" - terms that imply the life-saving activities of doctors rather than the life-discarding ones of warriors. It's probably no coincidence that our own War Office was renamed the Ministry of Defence in 1964, the year when the Tonkin "incident" led to the "escalation" of the "conflict" in Vietnam. True, the British government took no direct part in the "winning of hearts and minds" or the "deployment of Agent Orange", but we did our bit by carpet-bombing our own sensibilities with such highlytoxic euphemisms. Almost a half-century later we're still at it, and while the vanguard is formed by that bewildering phenomenon, "humanitarian intervention", it is in the vital area of "logistical support" that we Britons have proved ourselves most linguistically adept.
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A Point of View is on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST Will Self is a novelist and journalist. Or listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer BBC Podcasts - A Point of View Four Thought podcast

Consider this, a few weeks ago DSEi was held at the ExCel Exhibition Centre in London's Docklands. It sounds innocuous enough, doesn't it, just another tedious trade fair full of men and women in suits with plasticised passes dangling from the lanyards around their necks. Even when you tease those initials out to read Defence and Security Equipment International it remains ineffably dull, but perhaps a little more urgency accrues when you consider that this enormous bazaar of bombs, guns and assorted other lethality is organised in association with your own government, a government that, the preceding week, sent speakers to an event entitled - with commendable directness - "The Middle East: a vast market for UK Defence and Security Companies." So, even as Gaddafi's forces were being destroyed in bizarre battles that pitted British weapons against other British weapons, plans were afoot to sell still more of the same to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East - such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - with documented histories of human rights abuses. Throughout the first two quarters of this year, even as tensions in the region reached boiling point, arms sales were approved by the British government to Algeria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

It has become a commonplace of political discourse since the banking crisis of 2008 to compare the national finances to those of an individual or a family. You cannot - or so we are admonished by our current rulers - continue to run up more debts, when your credit cards are already maxed-out.

The arms trade is worth 1-2% of UK total exports

But why shouldn't we apply the same domestic analogy to the conduct of states themselves? If we consider a government that attacks its own citizenry to be on a par with a homicidal maniac who stabs his wife, then what does that make the government/person who supplies the knife other than an accessory to uxoricide? Put like this, the reported remark by Gerald Howarth, the junior defence minister, on the "debt" that Iraq and Libya owe to Britain comes into the tight focus of literalism: "We liberated the Iraqis from a tyrant, we liberated Libya from a tyrant, frankly I want to see UK business benefit from the liberation we've given to their people." In other words, having sold plenty of knives to this bloodthirsty family, we expect gratitude to take the form of the Libyans buying more. The elision of business-speak with the foggy verbiage of warfare is perhaps the most deranging aspect of the contemporary arms trade. The existence of a government unit devoted to promoting arms exports is not that surprising given successive prime ministers have also acted as de facto salesmen for British weapons manufacturers - that this unit should be called the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation - usually abbreviated to a string of inert initials: UKTI DSO - cloaks it with the spuriously prosaic legitimacy of flogging widgets. Time and again we are told that the arms industry - and by extension, arms exports - is an essential component of our economy and vital for that most vital of things - jobs.

Yet while we can quibble about the precise figures, the government's own statistics suggest that arms in fact only comprise 1%-to-2% of our total exports. Moreover, it's difficult to think of widget exporters who are promoted - in the way that arms ones have been - by extensive government support. But anyway, even if large numbers of British jobs were utterly dependent on selling arms to the Sri Lankans so they could pulverise Tamils, or to that delightful euphemism the Israeli Defence Force, so that they could - employing an apt Biblical figure of speech smite the Gaza Strip, can that really dignify such labour? Personally, I'd rather flip burgers or sign on for Jobseeker's allowance than forge death-metal in Vulcan's furnace.
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Let's call a spade a spade, a gun a gun, missile a missile Would I, I hear you ask, actually prefer it if arms exporters and their political sales force dropped all the indirection and cut straight to the chase by admitting freely that weaponry is nothing more or less than the extension of diplomacy by potentially violent means? Absolutely, let's call a spade a spade, a gun a gun, missile a missile, a cluster bomb a child-killer and a Tactica armoured car a means of brutal civilian repression when it's deployed by the Saudis to support the undemocratic government in Bahrain. Manufactured by BAE Systems, a British business and one of the biggest arms companies in the world, the Tactica shouldn't be allowed to go quietly about its strategically lethal and profitable business. But then BAE Systems are the past-masters of periphrasis when it comes to their deals with the Saudi regime. In 2007 BAE signed a contract to sell them 72 Eurofighter Typhoons in a 4.4bn deal called the Salaam Project - salaam, is of course the Arabic for "peace". This being just the latest instalment of the far larger Al Yamamah - or "the Dove" - deal brokered by Jonathan Aitken, among others, under the Thatcher regime. The wing-beats of the Dove - said to be the biggest sale of weapons to anyone, by anyone, ever - have been troubling successive British governments for years now but sadly I don't have the time to guide you around all the giddy twists and turns of its circumlocution.

Let a few plain-spoken facts suffice: the widely-alleged existence of a vast BAE slush fund with which to bribe Saudi government officials was under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office until they were called off following pressure from Tony Blair in 2006 on the grounds of the Mother of All Euphemisms, national security. Because the truth is there was a lot of national insecurity bound up in this, what with the alleged involvement in Al Yamamah of such luminaries as Mark Thatcher. Another world-class epigone, Prince Andrew, was heard at a dinner in Kyrgyzstan to decry the "idiocy" of the SFO, but then he was a special representative of UK Trade & Investment at the time - so that's wholly understandable. No, I fear that Mars moves in very murky and mysterious ways indeed, and we mere mortals are unlikely to be able to shine a searchlight upon them - at least, not until Apollo stops being the god of 40 watt light bulbs.

China artist Ai Weiwei served with $2m tax demand

Ai Weiwei spent almost three months in detention, but was never arrested Continue reading the main story

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Chinese authorities have served Ai Weiwei with an official demand telling him to pay 15m yuan ($2.3m; 1.4m) within 15 days, the artist has said. He said he had rejected the notice, and was not sure whether he would pay. The artist, one of China's most famous people, was held for almost three months earlier this year before being accused of "economic crimes". His supporters say the accusations are part of a plot to silence Mr Ai, who is an outspoken critic of the government. Mr Ai said he would pay the money if it was proved to be a tax issue. But he said he had not been able to review his company's account books because they had been taken by the authorities. And he said he had not seen any evidence showing that the firm had evaded tax. "I am only a designer of the company. I never signed any of the company's contracts, nor did I ever read any of the company's finance reports, so I have no idea," he told the BBC. Mr Ai was picked up by police in April as authorities rounded-up activists, following calls on websites for a Middle Eastern-style Jasmine revolution in China. The state news agency Xinhua said in June that Mr Ai had been released "because of his good attitude in confessing" to tax evasion and because he had agreed to pay back the money he owed. But on Tuesday he said: "It was not true that I admitted to tax evasion charges. I was never formally arrested and never charged." "If they really want to prove that I am a bad guy, why don't they behave themselves to make the process more transparent?" he later added. Since his incarceration, he has won numerous art awards, and was recently named the world's most powerful artist in a poll carried out by an art magazine.

His case has also become a cause celebre for rights activists and critics of China's Communist Party.

Israel to speed up settler homes after Unesco vote

Almost 500,000 Jews already live in settlements on occupied territory Continue reading the main story

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Israel says it will speed up Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - and freeze the transfer of funds to the Palestinian Authority. The announcement comes a day after the Palestinians won full membership of the UN cultural organisation, Unesco. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says the move will speed up the destruction of the peace process. The Israeli government has described the Unesco vote as a "tragedy".

A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, told the BBC the measures were designed to increase pressure on the Palestinians. Mr Palmor said they were "a response to unilateral measures aimed at confronting Israel at the UN and elsewhere on the international scene". "They [the Palestinians] shouldn't be wasting time by all these manoeuvres. They should continue to negotiate," he said. The Israeli government said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called for the accelerated construction of some 2,000 housing units. It said the construction will be in "areas that in any future arrangement will remain in Israel's hands", according to a statement quoted by Reuters news agency. The BBC's Kevin Connolly says the announcement will be seen as a punishment for the Palestinians and a warning to countries that backed their Unesco bid that Israel will react more strongly still if a similar application for Palestinian membership of the UN itself should prove successful. Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel broke down more than a year ago. The Palestinians are demanding an end to settlement building. Almost 500,000 Jews live in settlements on occupied territory. The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.