KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—Suspects are hung by their hands, beaten with cables, and in some cases, their genitals are twisted until they lose consciousness in detention facilities run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan national police, according to a study released Monday by the United Nations here.
The report provides a devastating picture of the abuses committed by arms of the Afghanistan government as the U.S.-led foreign forces here are moving to wind down their presence after a decade of war.
The abuses were uncovered even as U.S. and other Western trainers and mentors had been working closely with the ministries overseeing the detention facilities and funding their operations.
Acting on an early draft of the report seen last month, NATO stopped handing over detainees to the Afghans in several areas.
The report found evidence of “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” during interrogation in the accounts of nearly half of the detainees of the intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Intelligence, who were interviewed by UN researchers.
The national police treatment of detainees was somewhat less severe and widespread, the report found. Its research covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces.
“Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law,” the report said.
It was unclear from the report whether any information extracted under torture was used by either the Afghan government or its foreign military allies.
One detainee described being brought in for interrogation in Kandahar and having the interrogator ask if he knew the name of the office and then, after the man answered, was told, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban — even stones confess here.”
The man was beaten over several days for hours at a time with electric wire and then signed a confession, the report said.
The report pointed out that even though the abusive practices are entrenched, the Afghan government does not condone torture and has explicitly said the abuses found by the United Nations are not government policy.
“Reform is both possible and desired,” said Staffan de Mistura, the UN special representative for Afghanistan, noting that the government had cooperated with the report’s researchers and has begun to take remedial action.
“We take this report very seriously,” said Shaida Abdali, the deputy director of Afghanistan’s National Security Council.
“Our government, especially the president, has taken a very strong stand on the protection of everyone’s human rights, their humanity, everywhere and especially in prisons and in detention,” he said, adding that he had not yet read the full document.
Of the 324 conflict-related detainees interviewed, 89 had been handed over to the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces, and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. The UN Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for believing they are at risk of torture.
In the absence of remedial changes by the Afghans, the information could trigger a provision under U.S. law, known as the Leahy amendment that would stop some financing for the Afghan security forces, according to human rights experts.
The report overall raises broad ethical questions about U.S. funding of foreign security forces whose military and law enforcement officials routinely use torture.
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