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Torture

"I told my investigators... 'What crime do you have against me?'... Their answer was nothing else but beating me... They tied my hands behind my back, then they shackled my legs, then tied my hands to my feet. After, they pulled me flat on the ground and then they started beating me. This was their answer."

A political prisoner held in Saudi Arabia in 1996 spoke these words. He and many other former prisoners have revealed a culture of police brutality, torture and ill- treatment in many police stations, prisons and detention centres across the country. Beatings with sticks, electric shocks, cigarette burns and nail-pulling are some of the torture methods often described.

Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system facilitates torture. Lack of judicial supervision of arrest and detention, denial of prompt access to relatives and a doctor, and no access to lawyers all leave prisoners extremely vulnerable to abuse. Torture is used to extract confessions and to enforce discipline. Sometimes it is inflicted apparently without reason.

The judicial punishment of flogging, which amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, is regularly imposed. Offences related to alcohol, breaking strict moral codes and theft are punished by anything from 50 to several thousand lashes, carried out in prison or in public squares with a bamboo stick.

There appears to be no upper limit on the number of lashes judges can impose. The most lashes in a single case recorded by Amnesty International is 4,000, imposed on Muhammad 'Ali al-Sayyid, an Egyptian convicted of robbery in 1990. The sentence was reportedly carried out at a rate of 50 lashes every two weeks. After each session he was left with bruised and bleeding buttocks, unable to sleep or sit for three or four days afterwards.

A hand cut off or a foot and hand cut off - such irrevocable punishments that amount to torture are imposed in Saudi Arabia for theft and burglary after grossly unfair trials. Amnesty International knows of 90 cases of judicial amputations between 1981 and December 1999, but the true total may be far higher. In acceding to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 1997, Saudi Arabia voluntarily committed itself to prevent torture and is obliged not to impose any punishments that amount to torture or gross ill-treatment.

Captions Front photo: A man being flogged in the main square in Riyadh © Camera Press