PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
26 May 2014
TUNIS – Today, the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) brings to a close its series of five trainings for the Libyan legal community. This series, held over the past two years, was designed to build the capacity of lawyers, judges, prosecutors, jurists, and activists to document cases of torture and ill-treatment in Libya. The final workshop, held this weekend in Tunisia amid the uncertain security situation in Libya, has been designed to ensure the sustainability of civil society organizations that are fighting to end the systemic practice of torture in Libya.
The first workshop, held in Tripoli in June 2012, sought to sensitize legal professionals to the issue of torture and encourage them to accept and endorse international anti-torture standards. The second workshop, held in Tripoli in September 2012, began to equip lawyers with practical tools to document cases of torture, arbitrary detention, forced disappearance, and other grave crimes. The third workshop, held in Tunis in October 2013, featured experience-sharing from Tunisian and Egyptian counterparts in how to construct national networks for legal aid. The fourth workshop, held in Tripoli earlier this month, refined participants’ knowledge of legal strategies to handle cases and increased their comfort with providing legal aid.
Gabriele Reiter, Regional Director for OMCT, gave the opening address of this fifth and final training: “Now our Libyan friends are fully prepared to document the most grotesque of crimes. But Libya is fast descending into a new spiral of violence, and the fight against torture is not exclusively a legal one. With this final workshop, we hope to inspire Libyan lawyers to take a step back and reflect on their efforts of the past two years, and to come up with a big-picture vision about how to carry on the fight against torture in a sustainable way.”
This final workshop thus aims to guide the participants toward a concrete understanding of maintaining a viable program of operation, as well as how to overcome the day-to day constraints they face while fighting torture in Libya. It is facilitated by Marwan Tashani, Head of the Libyan Judges’ Organization, who has accompanied all five trainings and describes a “world of a difference” from the first training to this last. With the completion of this workshop, OMCT will have trained more than 100 Libyan lawyers and human rights defenders on: the proper documentation of torture cases; prison and detention center visitation protocols; monitoring human rights violations; and, perhaps most significantly, ensuring that Libyan civil society and local NGOs possess the necessary vision and expertise to achieve their long-term goals and to guarantee their continued sustainability.
Over the past two years, the most active participants in this series of workshops and training seminars have mobilized to create the Libyan Network for Legal Aid (LNLA). The network is a team of lawyers, activists, and jurists trained by OMCT, who began informally monitoring human rights violations since the very first days of the Libyan revolution and who now enjoy a solid professional platform. Salahadin Abukhzam, President of the LNLA, said, “OMCT has bestowed on us both the legal expertise and project management skills to ensure the long-term sustainability of our network.”
At this critical moment in Libya, OMCT trusts that the 100 legal professionals trained through this series will have an outsized effect in stabilizing the country and restoring the rule of law, with view to a future in which all Libyans can live peacefully and exercise their basic rights.


