Sri Lankan Government Accused of Torture

Torture, degrading punishments and ill-treatment in prison appear to have become routine practices in Sri Lanka, the United Nations has said.

The findings from Manfred Nowak, the UN's independent expert on torture and other cruel and degrading punishment, came after the academic visited the island earlier this month. Sri Lanka has been gripped by months of vicious fighting between Tamil Tiger guerrillas, fighting for a separate homeland, and the country's armed forces.

After touring prisons and police stations, Prof Nowak had concluded that torture "is prone to become routine in the context of counter-terrorism operations".

In a statement he said that "numerous consistent and credible allegations from detainees who reported that they were ill-treated by the police during inquiries in order to extract confessions, or to obtain information in relation to other criminal offenses". Similar allegations were received with respect to the army.

Yesterday thirteen rebels were killed in attacks in the north of the country. The death toll since the conflict erupted in 1983 stands at about 70,000.

Human rights groups have long accused both sides of gross human right violations but the UN has gone further by pointing the finger at the government. The academic admitted that the war in the north of the country had prevented him from going to visit the Tamil Tigers' jails.

However in the government system Prof Nowak said he had been told that prisoners had been beaten, had been suspended from the ceiling, burnt with cigarettes and asphyxiated with plastic bags. There were also "various forms of genital torture".

There is rising international concern over the scale of the abuses in Sri Lanka. Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, had earlier this month angered authorities in Colombo by saying the situation was deteriorating and highlighted "the weakness of the rule of law and prevalence of impunity".

Prof Nowak's report comes just a week after the Sri Lankan government rejected a call by the US state department for an international human rights presence to monitor rights abuses in the island.

There has also been tide of unexplained disappearances on the Indian Ocean island. Human Rights Watch claimed that there had been 1,100 abductions or "disappearances" reported between the beginning of 2006 and June 2007. Critics say that the army has been indiscriminately targeting Tamil civilians in its 'war on terror'.