Priest Demands Action on Police Torture

NEW DELHI, Apr. 21, 2010, 11:00 Hrs (UCAN):

An increase in the incidents of torture and death in police and judicial custody shows the need for human rights lessons for the police, a Church official said today [April 16].

The New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) reported on April 13 that the number of deaths in custody in India increased by 41.66 percent in the past six years.

The Indian Supreme Court on April 15 also called for firm action to check torture and custodial deaths.

“They are human rights violations,” Capuchin Father Nithiya Sagayam, secretary of the Indian bishops’ Commission for Justice, Peace and Developments, told UCA News.

The country’s top court said torture and deaths in lock-ups and police stations had increased across the country and described such incidents are “the most heinous crime by men in uniform.”

A person in police custody should be considered innocent unless his guilt is proven, Father Sagayam said.

“Police have no right to torture or harass a person in their custody. Instead the law expects them to safeguard the personal liberty and life of citizens.”

Such crimes occurred because of lack of proper training for police personnel, he said.

“First of all, the government should teach them the basics about human rights,” he said and pointed out that most victims are the voiceless poor and marginalized.

“In many cases the actual criminals are out in the open and the innocent are behind bars,” the priest said.

He wants the government to seriously take up the court’s suggestion to deal strongly with deaths in custody and for the federal government to take up the matter with the states.

The ACHR report, “Torture in India 2010,” noted a 70.72 percent increase in deaths in prison custody and 12.6 percent increase in deaths in police custody.

“It is the common people who are mainly tortured and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment,” it said.

In the past five years, the rights group has recorded 7,468 police custodial deaths in India, an average of four deaths a day. It also noted that an equal number or more have also died in the custody of army and paramilitary forces.

The government, however, denies these allegations.