Torture by any agent of the state whenever proved must be met with the most exacting punishment and at least immediate removal from the force and no chance of re-employment within the same sector.
This is not what happened in the most heinous setting alight of the genitals of a juvenile boy in the Leonora Police Station in 2009. The two key accused Messrs Dulai and Lall were promoted this year according to an announcement publicised by the Guyana Police Force on January 2nd – one by the acting Police Commissioner, Mr Seelall Persaud and the other by the Police Service Commission (PSC) following a recommendation by the force. Both Mr Persaud and the constitutional commission, the PSC have acted completely against the interest of law and order. Their decisions must be reversed and they should be made to properly explain their folly particularly in light of Justice George’s finding of 2009 in a civil case that there had been torture and gross violations by the police of the juvenile in question.
In an editorial in this newspaper of June 27, 2011, it was stated as follows: “Following on Justice George’s judgment it is clear as day that the Guyana Police Force has some decisions to take. Messrs Dulai and Lall must no longer be part of this force or any other segment of the disciplined services. Their brand of policing, shades of which no doubt have been in evidence for some time, (does) not belong in civilized society but in the bloody dungeons of autocracies in other parts of the world. There should be a formal finding by the force of the transgressions of the duo and they should be penalized to the fullest extent of the authority of the force and dismissed from it. The force then needs to immediately embark on a campaign to ensure that all of its ranks, all of its police stations and its internal affairs department are fully attuned to the need to eschew the practices that were employed on this boy. The force must also come up with some mechanism which would send up red flags when juveniles in particular end up in police stations in violation of normative rules and without access to their families or counsel. Juveniles must not under any circumstance be taken into custody in the way that this 14-year-old was.”
This admonition fell on deaf ears and has no doubt contributed to equally egregious ongoing abuse cases by policemen against the youth of this country. In all of this the police hierarchy and the Ministry of Home Affairs did nothing to purge the force of these miscreants. Indeed, in the 2009 case, they no doubt planned to do the opposite on the sails of some perverted reasoning leading to the astonishing declaration on Friday by the Chairman of the PSC Mr Omesh Satyanand that aside from the matter of torture, Inspector Narine Lall had had an unblemished record. Any single act that so flagrantly breaches the serve and protect covenant sworn to by a policeman automatically requires – not demotion or worse, promotion – but the relevant hearing followed by condign punishment. The quicker that Mr Satyanand and the police force recognise this the less the risk of torture by policemen. It can only be that both the Guyana Police Force and the PSC have become irreversibly undermined by the government’s shameful stance on the the observation of human rights of detainees including to the international treaties that it is a signatory to including the UN’s Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).
Article 4 of CAT states as follows:
- Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
- Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
That standard was clearly not observed in this case.
In the wake of the case involving Dulai and Lall there have been many reports of police abuse and torture. A case in the High Court for the murder of hairdresser Bibi Saymar fell apart on Friday as the police were accused of beating a caution statement out of the prime witness – an age-old malady.
Then there are two other policemen before the court on charges that mirror the calculating malevolence of the Dulai and Lall case. In May last year, Junior Thornton’s hands were burnt by a policeman at the Sparendaam police station. The state has already conceded as much even though it is still to pay the $1.5m compensation promised. Then there is the case of Cadet Officer Franz Paul who was accused of shooting a youth, Alex Griffith in his mouth on April 30th last year in a Russian Roulette display. This matter is still before the court.
It is clear from all of this that despite its regular declarations of reforms and respect for human rights that neither the Ministry of Home Affairs nor the Guyana Police Force has taken serious steps to address this scourge. In fact, as proved by these two promotions, they have gone in the opposite direction and the constitutional commission has been led in this direction by the deep government influence in the form of commissioners like Mr Carvil Duncan. Having come from a long era of support for the governments of the PNC and eventually switching his support to the PPP/C his utterances in this respect have absolutely no credibility.
Guyana will attract further scrutiny from the United Nations on torture as the case at the Leonora Police Station was raised at Guyana’s Universal Periodic Review in Geneva in 2010. These promotions have done a great injustice to the victim of the 2009 torture and painted Guyana as a state in which policemen can get away with torture.
