Evidence of torture

Executive summary

This report discusses three types of evidence of torture relating to Pakistani clients of the Medical Foundation: clients' own testimony, medical documentation, and evidence of human rights abuses, including torture, in Pakistan. Each of these strands of evidence can be important in establishing a claim to asylum. Yet the Home Office-and to some extent the Immigration Appellate Authority-ignore, marginalise or wrongly evaluate each of them.

Pakistan has been in the top ten countries generating asylum seekers to the UK for several years. Very high refusal rates of Pakistani asylum claims (96-99% in 1996-2000), together with considerable numbers of Pakistanis seeking care from the Medical Foundation provide the rationale for this report.

The study reviews the cases of 51 Pakistani clients (48 men and 3 women) whose torture was medically documented by 18 different medical staff. The sample consisted of all those medically documented between 1 January 1996 and 30 June 2000.

Over half the sample had been detained and tortured in Pakistan within the last six years. People with differing views are targeted by more extreme adherents of religious or ethnic groups and often by supporters of the party in power. Women are at risk both from the police if detained, and within the family. Successive governments in Pakistan have proved unable or unwilling to protect these individuals from torture and other forms of persecution.

The study found the following torture methods:

• Almost all the clients were punched, kicked or beaten with batons, belts and leather straps;
• More than a third were suspended, usually upside down, often being beaten in this position;
• About a third were burnt, generally with cigarettes, but also with acid or boiling water;
• One in five of the sample suffered sexual torture, some of whom were raped;
• Most suffered some combination of: handcuffing, blindfolding, enforced nakedness, and were denied food, drink or the use of a toilet;
• All reported continuing physical or psychological problems as a result of their torture. Every client was taking some form of medication to combat the effects.

Conditions in detention were often appalling-dark, dirty, cramped, overcrowded, hot. Several clients suffered broken bones, or lost consciousness or both as a result of their torture.

Three quarters of the clients lived in Sindh or Punjab provinces. Three-quarters supported a political party. The police were responsible for two thirds of the detentions; these generally lasted about a week. Almost two thirds of the clients had been detained more than once. Several clients suffered attacks in the street or in their homes. Charges were pressed in one quarter of the detentions but only two clients were convicted (both in absentia; both denied the charges). In general, clients were released after bribes were paid.

When the Home Office examined the applications of our Pakistani clients for asylum it generally ignored the first kind of evidence, the clients' own testimony. Many clients are refused without the Home Office stating whether or not it believes that testimony. Clients' accounts of torture are downplayed and described in phrases such as "your claimed difficulties", and cases put into a fast track procedure because of the claimed lack of evidence. Decisions are made without efforts to secure medical evidence where appropriate. Inappropriate refusals of the claim to asylum were made on the basis of insufficient evidence. These cause enormous distress to our clients and prolong the total time taken finally to determine a case.

In spite of all the evidence of torture in Pakistan provided by human rights observers, the Home Office in 1996 made a formal legal declaration that in its view, Pakistan was a country where there was in general no serious risk of persecution. This categorisation was used as the basis to fast track many of the cases considered in this report, and may, we consider, have constituted an obstacle to having their torture testimony taken as seriously as it deserved. Earlier this year however, the Appeal Court confirmed the ruling that so to characterise Pakistan was unlawful and irrational.

The report concludes that the Home Office hardly ever makes a proper evaluation of the evidence of torture from the individual's own testimony, from what is known of torture in Pakistan or from medical evidence. We also found these deficiencies when the Home Office has examined asylum applications made by Medical Foundation clients from Turkey, India and Sri Lanka. This inadequacy is leading to a systematic failure by the UK to honour its international obligations to protect asylum seekers with a history of torture.

The report makes six main recommendations:

1. That the Home Office uses information available to it and reflected in its Country Assessment to assess more accurately the risk of persecution on return to asylum seekers with a history of torture;

2. That all Immigration Officers are instructed to ask every applicant who gives a history of torture how they were treated in detention;

3. That Home Office interviewers should be instructed to suggest a medical examination in all cases where an applicant gives a history of torture;

4. That the Home Office engages seriously with evidence of torture given by applicants at interview and evaluates it against reliable information about torture in the country of origin;

5. The Home Office should ensure that it has all relevant evidence (including medical evidence where appropriate) before reaching a decision on a claim;

6. That the Home Office stops wrongly putting claims into fast track procedures.