EUR 01/03/00 Concerns in Europe: January

CONCERNS IN EUROPE January - June 2000 FOREWORD This bulletin contains information about Amnesty International’s main concerns in Europe between January and June 2000. Not every country in Europe is reported on: only those where there were significant developments in the period covered by the bulletin. The five Central Asian republics of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are included in the Europe Region because of their membership of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). This bulletin contains an index on pages about cases and incidents investigated by Amnesty International affecting women and children. They are not an exhaustive summary of the organization’s concerns, but a reflection of the range of violations suffered by women, children and juveniles in Europe. A number of individual country reports have been issued on the concerns featured in this bulletin. References to these are made under the relevant country entry. In addition, more detailed information about particular incidents or concerns may be found in Urgent Actions and News Service Items issued by Amnesty International. This bulletin is published by Amnesty International every six months. References to previous bulletins in the text are: Amnesty International September 2000 AI Index: EUR 01/03/00 2 Concerns in Europe: January - June 2000 AN ANNIVERSARY CHALLENGE: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE HELSINKI FINAL ACT AT 25 AND THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS AT 50 The year 2000 brings with it two very important anniversaries with regard to the protection and promotion of human rights in Europe - the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975 and the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights in November 1950. These two landmark events in modern European history - the one eventually giving rise to the establishment of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE); the other providing the cornerstone for the Council of Europe human rights system, including the European Court of Human Rights - will be duly celebrated this year with a round of grand speeches and lavish banquets. European governments will congratulate one another on the scope and the durability of these enterprises begun a quarter and half a century ago in Helsinki and in Rome, and on the clear articulation of “European values” which these institutions have come to represent. While acknowledging the extraordinary achievements in human rights protection which have followed on from the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Helsinki Final Act, Amnesty International is also choosing to mark this anniversary with a sobering reminder of how much work remains to be done to ensure that the individual guarantees enshrined in these and subsequent European instruments and standards are genuinely available to all men, women and children who inhabit the European space. The succeeding pages of this document should be read as a challenge to those at the banquet table and the gilded lectern for whom Europe is a comfortable, secure place - a place where words of commemoration come more easily than evidence of sustained political will. The information which follows is a powerful reminder that full implementation of existing European human rights standards is very much an unfinished task. Unfortunately, this and preceding numbers of Concerns in Europe (Amnesty International’s bulletin containing information on the organization’s human rights concerns in Europe - published twice a year) provide ample evidence of the continuing incidence of torture and ill-treatment, excessive use of lethal force, lack of fair trial, denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and impunity for a range of human rights violations throughout the region. Such evidence suggests that these failings remain as entrenched a feature of the European political landscape as the aspirations contained in the documents whose origins we are celebrating this year. Better then to view this year’s anniversaries as the close of the first phase of a project than as the culmination of decades of persistent application of the highest principles over and above the demands of political expediency and sheer indifference. Just weeks before the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights on 4 November 2000, Amnesty International will be launching its third international Campaign Against Torture. Whereas Amnesty International’s two earlier campaigns had done much to raise global consciousness about the torture and ill-treatment of political prisoners and the need for effective international standards and mechanisms to prevent such crimes, many of the cases highlighted in the campaign to be launched on 18 October 2000 will be representative of the marginalized or especially vulnerable populations who are frequently the victims of torture and ill-treatment in the post-Cold War era. These include members of ethnic or racial minorities; immigrants; refugees and asylum-seekers; children; as well as criminal suspects - all of whom continue to be excluded from the full benefit of those protection systems which have been so carefully constructed over the past decades. AI Index: EUR 01/03/00 Amnesty International September 2000 Concerns in Europe: January - June 2000 3 This edition of Concerns in Europe contains detailed information about a number of such cases illustrating the above disturbing trends - including allegations of police ill-treatment of a 13-year old boy of Turkish origin in Austria; allegations of the ill-treatment of a Nigerian asylum-seeker during forcible deportation from Belgium; the harassment and ill-treatment of members of opposition movements - many of them student activists - by police in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; allegations of the torture and ill-treatment of dozens of ethnic Albanians by police in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; the alleged ill-treatment - including threats and racial abuse - of a French woman of Zairean origin by police in France; concerns about the conditions of detention for asylum-seekers in Germany following the suicide of an Algerian woman in the transit area holding facility at Frankfurt am Main airport; allegations of the ill-treatment of Afghan asylum- seekers by guards at a detention centre in Hungary; concerns about the toleration by military commanders of the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of younger conscripts in the Polish Army; the death in custody of a Roma man in Portugal after alleged police ill-treatment; reports of the rape and torture of several teenage boys and girls held by Russian Federation forces in “filtration camps” in Chechnya; allegations of the assault of a Cuban woman, four months pregnant, by police officers in Spain; allegations of police ill-treatment and racist abuse of an 17-year-old Angolan secondary school student living in Switzerland; and the reported beating by police of a criminal suspect in Ukraine in order to obtain a confession. The need for exceptional vigilance with regard to children in places of detention was underlined in the Ninth General Report of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), published in August 1999. In publishing a set of detailed guidelines for the prevention of ill-treatment of juveniles deprived of their liberty, the CPT made plain that “...regardless of the reason for which they may have been deprived of their liberty - juveniles are inherently more vulnerable than adults. In consequence, particular vigilance is required to ensure that their physical and mental well-being is adequately protected.” Safeguards urged by the CPT in its guidelines include guaranteed access to lawyers and doctors, and the right to notification of a relative or other third party immediately following detention; the prohibition of all forms of physical chastisement; and the accommodation of juvenile offenders in facilities separate from adult detainees. In the interests of lending real substance to the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, Amnesty International encourages all member states of the Council of Europe to give their immediate attention to the implementation of these safeguards, and to ensure that the CPT’s guidelines are widely disseminated to all relevant actors in society In the context of Europe, Amnesty International’s Campaign Against Torture will highlight the problem of impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the region - a constant blight on the continent’s human rights record in spite of the exemplary work of bodies such as the CPT and the relevant jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. With regard to torture and ill-treatment in Europe, the standards, the mechanisms, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, and the expertise on prevention are all there in abundance - only the political will, as ever, remains lacking at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Again, this edition of Concerns in Europe includes detailed information about how such impunity creates barriers to justice for victims of torture and ill-treatment across the continent - from a report on the European Court of Human Rights’ decision against Italy in April 2000 for its failure to effectively investigate alleged ill-treatment in Pianosa Island Prison, to

Load more