The Burundian Government had been granted an additional 48 hours until 6 p.m. Sunday 30 August to respond after it complained it had not had enough time to look into the allegations of reports by Burundian and international non-governmental organizations submitted to the CAT as alternative assessments of Burundi’s implementation of the Convention Against Torture since its last review in 2014.
In an unprecedented move by any State Party to the Convention, the Burundian delegation did not show up last week to provide its replies to the CAT after the first of two sessions allotted per country reviewed. It instead sent the CAT a letter, saying it was “surprised” the session had focused on examining information provided by civil society’s alternative reports which it had not been sent or consulted about. Representatives of the Burundian Government had attended the session on 28 July.
In a letter to the Burundian Ambassador to the UN, the CAT on 29 July responded that it regretted Burundi had decided to discontinue the dialogue and reminded it of the “constant practice” of conducting reviews on the basis of the reports provided by State Parties and of any information received from non-governmental sources or publicly available. It granted the authorities the standard 48-hour extension to submit complementary information. Experts have said that the move on the part of the Burundi shows its lack of political will to improve the human rights situation in the country.
“If a State does not even honour its legal obligations to answer questions on torture by the CAT, imagine what it does behind closed doors!” said Gerald Staberock, Secretary General of the World Organisation Against Torture. “This is a wake up call about the drama that is happening in Burundi; it shows how much the special review was needed.”
Rising violence
On 30 July, the UN Security Council announced it would deploy a UN police force of up to 228 officers to Burundi to help prevent further violence in the country. The Government of Burundi had earlier said it would not accept more than 50. The country witnessed in 1972 mass killings of Hutus by th
e Tutsi-dominated army, and in 1993, mass killings of Tutsis by the majority-Hutu population. President Pierre Nkurunziza is the former leader of a Hutu rebel group.
An acute political crisis broke out in the country when Nkurunziza in April 2015 announced he would run for President a third time in a row. Large protests left 400 people dead and over 200,000 Burundian fled their country. It is in that context that the CAT had requested, pursuant to Article 19, paragraph 1 of the Convention, that the Government of Burundi submits, two years ahead of the scheduled date, a special report on how it is fighting torture and ill treatment in the country. Only twice before has the CAT made such a request to any Government – in the cases of Israel in 1997 and Syria in 2012.
The CAT had for this special review of Burundi focused on the points it had asked the Government provide information on:
- whether reported cases of summary executions, political assassinations, arbitrary arrests, torture and ill treatment of journalists, human rights defenders and members of the opposition in 2015 had led to the prosecution of security force members;
- any progress made in the investigation of the armed attack against human-rights activist Pierre Claver Mbonimpa in August 2015 and the murder of his son a few months later (http://goo.gl/FBsdIf);
- the measures Burundi might have taken to investigate the allegations of torture by agents of the Service National de Renseignements (SNR) and if these have led to the prosecution of any of them;
- any measures taken by Burundi to investigate assassinations and acts of torture by members of the young Imbonerakure group against any people perceived as supporting the opposition, and whether any had been prosecuted;
- the mesures Burundi has taken to implement the recommendations contained in the Committee's Concluding Observations dated 26 November 2014, (paragraph 11 a),b) and d) and paragraph 22 b)).Generalized impunity
In its alternative report, the coalition of Burundian organizations expressed its concern that since the political crisis of 2015, the country has undergone an “exponential rise” in the use of torture and ill treatment by members of the SNR, the Imbonerakure militia or national police forces
It denounced the current Government’s use of arbitrary detention to repress the opposition, stating that SOS-Torture Burundi had counted 736 arbitrary arrests between December 2015 and 31 March 2016, while the OHCHR office in Burundi had counted 3,477 arbitrary arrests in the year to end of April 2016.
The coalition also said that since the President’s third term, it had counted more and more cases of forced disappearances among members of civil society, former Burundi Armed Forces personnel or young demonstrators from neighborhoods of mainly Tutsi ethnicity. Burundi has signed but not ratified the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances.
Burundi filed its special report to the CAT on 29 June instead of 7 March, while a coalition of Burundian organizations sent a joint report to the CAT on 4 July. Standard practice is that all reports submitted to the CAT are uploaded on the CAT's website one week before the start of the session. The CAT will announce its Concluding Observations on Burundi on 12 August, when the session closes.
The organizations of the NGO coalition are: Action des Chrétiens pour l’Abolition de la Torture au Burundi (ACAT Burundi), Association Burundaise pour la Protection des Droits Humains et des Personnes Détenues (APRODH), campagne SOS-Torture / Burundi, Collectif des Avocats des Victimes de Crimes de Droit International (CAVIB), Coalition Burundaise pour la Cour Pénale Internationale (CB-CPI), le Forum de la Société civile pour le Monitoring des Elections (COSOME), Collectif pour la Promotion des Associations des Jeunes (CPAJ), Forum pour la Conscience et le Développement (FOCODE), Forum pour la Conscience et le Renforcement de la Société Civile (FORSC), Ligue Burundaise des Droits de l’Homme (Ligue ITEKA) and Réseau des Citoyens Probes.
They received support from OMCT, Centre pour les droits civils et politiques (CCPR), Fédération internationale de l’Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture (FIACAT), TRIAL International, and DefendDefenders (East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project).
All NGO reports submitted to the CAT are available here: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=1084&Lang=en
The report by the Burundian Government can be found here: http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=1084&Lang=fr .
For more information on Burundian civil society participation at the CAT please contact sa@omct.org, or lb@omct.org for OMCT communications.
As coordinator of civil-society presence at the CAT, OMCT:
- communicates ahead of time with national NGOs warning them that their countries will be reviewed in an upcoming session,
- builds the reporting capacity of NGOs on the Convention Against Torture through legal trainings in their home countries;
- provides administrative, logistical and financial support to NGOs to enable their programmed attendance of CAT sessions and private briefings;
- provides technical, information-gathering and editorial support to effective country reporting;
- moderates the NGO private briefing sessions reserved for NGOs to jointly bring their concerns to the Committee;
- recommends visibility opportunities for advocacy messaging during CAT sessions;
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