The Mexican government has not complied with the 72 recommendations made by the Committee against Torture (CAT) of the UN, members of human rights organizations visiting our country declared.
Six months after experts issued observations regarding ending torture, Andrea Meraz, director of the World Organization against Torture (OMCT), and Anne Boucher, of the Association of Christians for the Abolition of Torture, based in France (ACAT -F), concluded that the Mexican government is not taking steps to comply with the diretives of the UN experts.
From May 26 to 31, Meraz and Boucher carried out an observation mission in the states of Chihuahua and Guerrero and in Mexico City, meeting with state and federal authorities, civil organizations and victims of torture,
At a press conference, held at the completion of the mission, Andrea Meraz expressed her concern as to why
"despite the federal government's recognition that torture is a serious problem in Mexico, we don't see that they are taking steps to address the problem."She said that in a meeting with the director of the International Civil Rights Policy of the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, Consuelo Olvera,
"she commented that they will form a working group to comply with the 72 recommendations made by the UN experts last December."The director of OMCT recalled that the main concerns expressed by the CAT experts have to do with the high number of disappearances in Mexico, so they felt that it is premature to assess the specialized unit [to search for disappeared persons] recently created by the Attorney General (PGR), which only has 12 prosecutors,
"That is very few agents and human resources allocated for such a big problem."Anne Boucher added that enforced disappearance
"is a constant torture for the families and victims, and in Mexico the concern is that this crime is only attended to when it is carried out by an agent of the state."She added that during their visit they found it very troubling that one of the main recommendations made by the CAT has not been addressed, which is the elimination of the the arraigo [detention for 40 to 80 days without filing formal charges with a judge].
"It appears to us that, far from eliminating the procedure, what [Congress] is attempting is to extend the time in which people are held by the Public Ministry [investigative police] before presentation to a judge from 72 hours to almost a week, when we know that it is during the first hours of detention that torture is carried out," said the advocate.Boucher said that
"according to statistics just 3% of people held under arraigo ended up convicted by a judge, so that the majority of the persons detained under this procedure were deprived of freedom and abused for no reason, and they will not have reparations for the damage caused."She reported that in January of this year ACAT-F launched an international campaign called "Stop Arraigo", aimed at the abolition of this procedure in Mexico. It gathered 15,000 signatures in Europe. The petitions against arraigo were delivered to President Enrique Pena Nieto through the Office of Public Service of the Presidency.
Andrea Meraz said that during the mission, they noticed that there were members of the executive and judiciary branches who chose to deny the existence of torture. The specific example presented was that of Chihuahua, where the Secretary General of Government, Raymundo Romero Maldonado,
"assured that torture had been abolished in that state since the military and federal police left the government of Cesar Duarte in charge of security."She said that in meetings with civil organizations and relatives of victims of torture,
"we found that although ... the violence has decreased, torture is a situation that continues to prevail, despite Chihuahua being one of the states where the new criminal justice system [of oral, adversarial trials] is already operating and statements extracted under torture should not be accepted [as evidence]."The attitude of judges in the systems operating in Mexico, she said,
"is to admit confessions extracted under torture, even when victims denounce them at the time they are presented to the judges. Generally, we have seen that judges consider when a person reports that he was tortured, they considers it is part of his defense strategy, when under the Constitution, an official investigation ought to be opened."She further said that during the mission, they found that there have been no investigations or convictions for acts of torture, and when specialized studies are carried out to determine whether there was torture, using the Istanbul Protocol, it isn't admitted by the court when it was performed by a public agency such as the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH ).
The activists announced that in November they will submit a report to the CAT in parallel to the one that the Mexican State is obliged to deliver as part of the implementation of the recommendations issued last December. Spanish original