Question: The United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture aims to provide psychological, medical, and legal assistance to victims of torture and their families. This assistance contributes to the rehabilitation of victims and combats impunity.
Answer:
This Fund seeks to provide a solution for assisting victims of torture in the absence of effective state assistance mechanisms, so that justice can be done and the cycle of impunity can be broken.
Since 2008, this Fund has been coordinated by the Justice and Fight against Impunity Unit of the UNJHRO, and activities are implemented by the international NGO Lawyers Without Borders.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), cases of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in detention are regularly reported. These abuses are committed at different stages of the detention process: during arrest, during interrogation, and/or in detention.
Although the DRC Constitution, the Penal Code, and the Military Penal Code prohibit all forms of torture and other cruel acts, such treatment is inflicted with total impunity by the security services, the National Police, and the FARDC. Torture has not been established as a separate offense but as an aggravating circumstance to another offense.
Torture is defined in Article 1 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1984 (Resolution 39/46), as:
"(...) any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, to intimidate or coerce that person or another person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. This term does not extend to pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."
Rape is considered a form of torture.
Commemoration of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Question: The scale of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has led United Nations agencies, the government, and national and international NGOs to set up a Joint Initiative for the Prevention of and Response to Sexual Violence in order to combat impunity for sexual violence and ensure holistic care for victims.
Answer:
Thanks to financial support from the Kingdom of Belgium, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), this initiative was able to get off the ground. This support responds to concerns raised at the end of 2003 by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights that “despite the international community's awareness of the extent of violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), very few resources are made available to NGOs.”
An initial project was first funded between 2005 and 2009 by the Kingdom of Belgium in the provinces of Equateur, Maniema, and Orientale, to the tune of €7.82 million. In 2006, support from CIDA in the amount of 15 million Canadian dollars made it possible to extend the project until 2011 in North and South Kivu, particularly in the cities of Goma, Bukavu, Uvira, Butembo, and Beni. Finally, since the end of 2010, SIDA has supported the development of the project with nearly $2.8 million in six other provinces: Kinshasa, Bandundu, Bas-Congo, West Kasai, East Kasai, and Katanga. With this latest contribution, the program will have covered all 11 provinces of the DRC.
Activities are carried out jointly with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) with the following partner agencies: WHO, UNIFEM, UNDP, WFP, MONUSCO, FAO, OCHA, ILO, and UNHCR. This program is structured around four components. Each UN agency is responsible for implementing the following components in accordance with its mandate:
- UNFPA: medical and health care;
- UNICEF: psychosocial care;
- UNFPA: socioeconomic reintegration;
- OHCHR/OHCHR-DRC: legal assistance to victims of sexual violence.
The “legal assistance” component
The specific objective of the “legal assistance to victims of sexual violence” component, provided by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) through the OHCHR-DRC, is to combat the widespread impunity that accompanies sexual violence in the DRC and thus provide legal and judicial assistance to victims and their families. This project seeks to encourage victims of sexual violence to bring cases before the competent courts and institutions, not only to secure the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators of these acts, but also, and above all, to ensure that the judicial decisions handed down are enforced.
The “legal assistance for victims of sexual violence” component has so far received US$1.85 million in funding from Belgium and C$1,865,000 from CIDA.
This component responds to the need to combat the impunity observed in the face of such violations.
In 2006, the Report on the Human Rights Situation in the DRC (July-December 2006) analyzed that despite an increase in reported cases of sexual violence, only “a small number of cases” are brought to justice.
Indeed, “despite the adoption of laws imposing harsher penalties for sexual violence by the Transitional Parliament, cases continue to multiply at an alarming rate in several regions of the country, with almost total impunity,” according to the Report on the Human Rights Situation in the DRC between January and June 2007. "In the absence of a functioning judicial system, there has been an increase in cases settled out of court by traditional chiefs or local administrative authorities, to the detriment of the victim's right to a fair trial and in violation of the Constitution and the new laws adopted. According to the same report, in South Kivu, “cases brought to court represent less than 1% of all cases recorded” during the period analyzed.
In order to achieve its objectives, the UNJHRO, together with its local partners, is carrying out the following main activities:
Capacity building
- Organization of training for magistrates, judicial police officers, lawyers, prison staff, members of human rights NGOs, traditional leaders, and political and administrative authorities on sexual violence, human rights, and specifically women's rights, legal support for victims of sexual violence, international crimes, and techniques for interviewing victims of sexual violence
- Dissemination and popularization of new laws and awareness campaigns
Institutional support
- Support for the reform of Congolese law to include specific laws on sexual violence;
- Minor renovations of judicial structures.
Legal support
- Establishment of community relays
- Establishment of groups of lawyers to provide legal assistance to victims of sexual violence.
- Establishment of legal clinics for better legal and judicial support
Bas-Congo: 50 National Police officers trained to combat sexual violence
Competition for journalists on human rights
North and South Kivu: Journalists trained to cover sexual violence trials
Sexual violence: Inauguration of a legal clinic in Uvira
Question: The program was set up by the UNJHRO in 2006 with the aim of best fulfilling its mandate to protect civilians against all human rights violations. This program seeks to coordinate efforts and facilitate protective measures for victims, witnesses, defenders, and journalists under imminent threat of physical violence.
Answer:
The program, coordinated by the Protection Unit, has as its main objectives the handling of individual protection cases in the context of the fight against impunity and the strengthening of local protection capacities, both at the state and civil society levels. This program is supported by the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sweden, and Switzerland.
The beneficiaries of OHCHR protection are all civilians (victims, witnesses, human rights defenders, journalists) whose physical integrity is under imminent threat because of their political, journalistic, human rights, and/or similar activities.
To achieve its objectives, eleven National Protection Officers (NPOs) are deployed in eleven UNJHRO field offices (FOs) in eight provinces (Equateur, West and East Kasai, South and North Kivu, Katanga, Maniema, and Orientale Province).
The role of the ONPs is to strengthen the capacities of human rights defenders, judicial authorities, police, and security services with regard to protection. The ONPs are also responsible for receiving victims of real threats and applying protective measures after verification.
The ONPs work in conjunction with the protection network set up in these provinces. These protection networks are composed of human rights NGOs.