Dear Editor,
With reference to your editorial of Sunday, November 8, 2009, am I correct in my interpretation that Mr Hydar Ally is claiming that Police Standing Orders permit the police to use some measure of force to extract information from suspects? What Standing Orders is Mr Ally perusing? Is he referencing Standing Orders that are being issued to the police from Freedom House, or some other political directorate? Is he referencing Standing Orders that his government inherited from the Soviet Empire, that is, after that collective dissolved into several democratic states and violent interrogatory methods became obsolete? Which set of English words or phrases in those orders led Mr Ally to claim the existence of a “provision authorizing the Police to use some force in the extraction of confession statements”? I am really curious to see how the legal luminaries in Guyana will react to this latest faux pas from a PPP official.
The police are allowed to use force that is necessary for the purpose of effecting an arrest, preventing the commission of a crime, and so on and so forth. Unless someone re-wrote what has been set down in Police Standing Orders and the Laws of Guyana, at no point is there any suggestion or even implication that any measure of coercion whatsoever should be used to extract information from people, whether they are potentially witnesses to a crime, or suspects in the commission of a crime. The legal and ethical principle in this aspect of the law holds that such statements must be obtained in a manner that is free and voluntary. Hence the legal burden on the police and prosecution to prove that beyond any reasonable doubt.
The fact that the police are required by law to advise those they take into custody that they are not obliged to say anything to the police unless they wish to do so, renders Mr Ally’s pronouncement ridiculously fatuous. Is it any wonder that some members of the security services are more and more resorting to torturing people they take into custody? Obviously they are being supplied with, or taking advisories from, interpretation of their powers that amount to violations of the Laws of Guyana, and the United Nations articles on the treatment of persons taken into custody by the state
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The pronouncement by the Permanent Secretary makes the government directly answerable to international law for any torture carried out by a member of the force. If the laws of our nation unambiguously forbid the use of coercion to elicit information from persons, confessional or otherwise, and government officials are contradicting those orders with interpretations that authorize even a minimal amount of force as an interrogatory technique, those officials are violating both local and international statutes. I say again, the kind of backwardness that has been infused into our national discourse over the past 17 years is nauseatingly embarrassing.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams
