Humanitarian black holes

Very few will spend any time ever considering the state of lockup cells in police stations nationwide. It is not high in terms of public awareness, and those that do have an awareness of the state of these custodial limbos care little for what they see or know. Thus we should be thankful to the National Commission for Human Rights Pakistan (NCHRP) as to the desperate state of many if not most of these places. To clarify, a police lockup is neither a jail nor a prison and is to house a detainee for a short time in order to interrogate them or to ‘park’ them prior to transfer to a jail. As such they would be expected to provide basic facilities, including sanitary and ventilation as well as the provision of water.

The rights of the individual are not automatically suspended once they enter police custody contrary to what many may wish to believe. Individuals may be deprived of their liberty for a variety of lawful indeed essential reasons, but the humanitarian imperatives still apply. The report to President Mamnoon Hussain by the NCHRP exposes the woeful inadequacies of lockups with many lacking the basics. Life-safety codes are absent in many cases and there is little or no attempt to assess the detainee in respect of their mental health, history of suicidal events or attempts at self-harm and their previous criminal history. There is little or no surveillance via CCTV and overall the NCHRP notes the lack of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the management of police lockups.

None of the deficits detailed in the report come as any surprise and as ever it is everybody else’s fault than the responsible agency or entity. A senior police official in Sindh blamed the home department for not keeping the police stations repaired as necessary and there may be truth in that, but the wider issue relates to decay in the fabric of human rights provision that is symptomatic of a national malaise and not just relative to police lockups. Is it fixable? Yes? Expensive? Not particularly. Going to happen? Probably not.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2018.

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