The state must cultivate intolerance towards torture

The word ‘torture’ is encountered quite often in the vocabulary of ordinary citizens, officials of various ranks, prosecutors with large stars on their shoulder straps, judges with intelligent faces, the President—the guarantor of the Constitution—and the Ombudsman.
Torture is the mockery of people, torment, and humiliation.
Statistics show that in almost every fourth Ukrainian family, there are victims of ‘executioners in uniform’. But even despite the striking and horrific figures, a spirit of intolerance towards human rights violations still does not exist in our society.
A situation is quite common where a person who is subjected to physical pain and moral suffering endures them and, gritting their teeth, only mentally laments their own fate, the Ukrainian mentality, and the fact that they were born in the wrong country.
What is the reason for such patient attitude of people towards torture? It lies in one thing: people do not realise that they themselves are the bearers of power, that they elect it, raise it, and are responsible for its disorder.
If we talk about torture in the police, the logic here is simple. A person is suspected of committing a crime. Investigators, who cannot or do not want to work, beat a confession out of them. After this, proving one's innocence regarding the incriminated offence in court becomes almost impossible.
But why torture those already convicted? Here, logic is absent and depends on the situation of a specific industry which, since the days of the Soviet Union, has been closed to society and has formed a state secret within itself.
And if society learns about torture in the police in many cases, then it is almost impossible to learn about torture and inhuman mockery in the closed institutions of the penal system.
Unfortunately, even twenty years after the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence, the State Department for the Execution of Sentences continues to only declare its aspiration for openness and bringing penitentiary institutions into compliance with European requirements.

Within the framework of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture, ratified by Ukraine back in 2006, the authorities must fulfil the following requirements:
• Create a system of independent national control mechanisms, carried out by independent national and international bodies, at places of detention, for the purpose of preventing torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment (Article 1).
• Create a global system of regular visits, carried out by independent international and national bodies, to places where persons are deprived of their liberty, for the purpose of preventing torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment.

To date, the legislator explicitly defines the right to exercise public control over the activities of penal bodies and institutions only for Supervisory Commissions. However, they are clearly failing to perform their functions. It is impossible to cite a single example of Supervisory Commissions initiating an investigation into facts of torture in places of detention and bringing the guilty to justice, even though the number of such cases is now counted not in units, but in dozens.
Simulating steps aimed at fulfilling the requirements of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture, the Ministry of Justice recently prepared a rather strange draft law ‘On Amendments to the Law “On the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights”’. By this document, it is proposed that the Ombudsman carry out regular visits to places of non-freedom and obtain information regarding the conditions of detention for the purpose of ensuring the observance of human rights and the prevention of torture.
But nothing currently prevents the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights from visiting these places. They are endowed with the right of unhindered access to any places of non-freedom for the purpose of identifying and stopping cases of human rights violations. And the fact that the Ombudsman uses this right only from time to time is not a problem of the absence of authority, but of the improper performance of the functions provided for by law. Why the Ministry of Justice believes that after the introduction of non-essential additions to the existing law, the Ombudsman will significantly change their attitude towards work is unclear.
The main highlight of the aforementioned draft law is point 8 of the explanatory note to it, which states that ‘the draft act does not require consultations with the public’. Then for whom, exactly, is it being adopted, and who, if not the public, should prepare, discuss, and implement all achievements in a democratic society?

In my conviction, creating and implementing the work of national preventive mechanisms for the prevention of torture is the lot of the public. This is a platform on which, over time, the first shoots of public intolerance towards such a shameful, dirty, and disgusting phenomenon as torture will emerge. And this popular intolerance towards torture must be nurtured, protected, and monitored in its development, so that later, at the international level, one can attest to the fact of its existence.
Perhaps this is the sacred mission of a democratic, civilised society and, first and foremost, the leadership of the state.
Is there anyone who disagrees?!