Ireland's failure to ratify a UN convention against torture was "despicable", a conference on violence and human coexistence has been told. Ireland is the only EU member state not to have ratified the convention, according to Dr Mohammed al-Sader, a pathology lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons who was tortured in his native Iraq more than 20 years ago. Dr al-Sader said human rights groups estimate that 79 states in the world continued to use torture. Government-sponsored torture represented the greatest threat to democracy at present, he told the World Congress on Violence and Human Coexistence in UCD yesterday.
Plans to establish a treatment centre in Ireland for refugees who have suffered torture have been put on hold following a change of mind by the Department of Health. The centre was to have been sited in Cork, but the Department says the project is "under review" and no decision has been made.
Estimates based on Danish research suggest that up to half the refugees in Ireland may have experienced torture.
Dr al-Sader said the UN convention provided the survivor of torture with a means of moral redress, as well as setting out a right to financial compensation and medical treatment.
He outlined the most common methods of physical torture, including the use of electric shocks, suspension of the victim, immersion in a liquid or in a bag, sexual torture and fallanga, or beating of the soles of the feet.
On the orders of Saddam Hussein's son, the Iraqi national football team was recently subjected to fallanga after losing an important fixture, Dr al-Sader said.
Psychological torture was also common: favoured methods included sleep deprivation, mock executions and the witnessing of torture. These were usually carried out by skilled technicians, including doctors, he said.
Ms Ailbhe Smyth, director of the Women's Education Resource and Research Centre in UCD, told the conference that the documented levels of violence against women in Ireland were "shocking". In the first six months of 1996, more women were killed than in the whole of the preceding two years. Women accounted for 20 per cent of murder victims in 1995, but 50 per cent in 1996.
Yet these were only "the tip of the iceberg", she said. A large majority of the perpetrators went unpunished.
