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You may not remember this name anymore, Abu Ghraib. It is a prison 32 kilometers from the capital of Iraq, Baghdad, in which several human rights violations occurred at the beginning of the invasion of that country in 2003. Among them were torture, rape and murder and were made public thanks to to photographs obtained by media – photographs that the US soldiers had kept as souvenirs and ended up on the CBS television channel.
At that time, the government of George Bush’s son certified that they were “isolated cases”, which did not reflect the policy of the US administration. Seventeen soldiers and officers were removed from the armed forces, 11 of them were court-martialed and sentenced.
The highest sentence was ten years; Janis Karpinski, who is responsible for all prison facilities in occupied Iraq, was demoted to colonel, but several other soldiers and officers involved were not even charged. In 2004, Bush publicly apologized for the case.
Not that there were great doubts, but what has been known since then about the methods used by the armed forces and especially by the US secret services in the so-called “war on terror.” It allows us to conclude that the systematic violation of the human rights of the prisoners was not an occasional mockery of malformed people and criminals but a method.
Of course, and this is history, when there is an unorganized power of the people over the people, when that power is exercised in institutions or places that stand out in the opacity and in which the eventual victims have no way of resorting to assistance or find that assistance extremely difficult, denying them the guarantees of the rule of law with the complicity of the representatives of the same rule of law, as is the case, never more than repeating it, of the judges who grant mail or by fax the extensions of the detention periods to foreigners placed in the detention centers of the Immigration and Border Service without even seeing them, without knowing it because they are alive or dead, beaten or unharmed (when the scope of the detention of Ihor Homeniuk, this would have been the target of the attacks that, according to the accusation, would cause his death; if the judge had demanded to see him, he would probably have saved him) – abuses occur, major or minor. You don’t need a master’s degree in organizational psychology to know this.
And yet, not being so, and there are warnings for several human rights organizations for years, as well as for the Defensoría del Pueblo and the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture (which operates in the office under the auspices of the United Nations) , nothing has been done to this. Until finally a death occurred (at least one, since there are at least two other cases revealed by Minister Eduardo Cabrita, one in 2014 and one in 2019, attributed to an “outbreak” of drug acorns) and now, suddenly, If you announce that all or almost everything reported will finally be resolved.
Turns out that what was reported is the reason for what happened. It is the reason for the death of Ihor Homeniuk. It is the reason for the attacks against all those who were attacked there, the mistreatment and inhumanities that were perpetrated there, the humiliations suffered there. Which means that whoever did not resolve it in time and in the face of complaints, as well as who, knowing what was happening, did not report, is responsible for what happened. And those responsible are many.
But let’s go first to what was reported. From the beginning, the total opacity of the places of detention, of which until now little was publicly known about the way they functioned and managed. The isolation of the people located there, who had their cell phones taken from them and were only allowed to use the phone once for free and for a very short time (witnesses speak for two minutes) or by phone card, and who were not allowed visits.
The difficulty of access for lawyers and even for State institutions such as the Ombudsman – in one of the reports on these centers, it is said that their representatives waited hours to enter the Espaço Similar to the Lisbon Installation Center. The fear expressed by the detainees, and which is denounced in the aforementioned documents of the Ombudsman’s Office, in which reference is even made to the complaint of physical attacks, which the complainants later ended up not confirming. The lack of translation / interpreters that the law itself admits, when it says that you have to communicate with the foreigner “in a language that you presumably understand” – and, it is concluded, if you do not understand patience, study – hence the role that you assigns For detainees with information, in fact quite encrypted, about their rights and duties, it should only come in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French.
It was even denounced that the 1994 law creating these euphemistically called “installation centers” refers to a revoked 1979 diploma relating to pre-trial detainees, who certainly have many more rights than those that have been recognized up to now as “installed”. -, thus leaving those spaces in a legal limbo that favored the creation of the exceptional territory called by the provider Maria Lúcia Amaral, in a 2018 interview with Public, from “no man’s land”.
A lawless place, literally, where those who were there ruled – and those who were permanently there were employees of a private security company who acted as they pleased, which is proven by the fact that they managed people (they did in Ihor ) as if it were a public authority – and without being admonished or denounced by any of the SEF inspectors, which means that for them it was fine and not even new.
Faced with this crime – because it is a crime that it is, despite the fact that the Public Ministry did not treat it as such, since it did not accuse the agents – and its acceptance by the different policemen who lived with it, It is impossible not to conclude that what happened there, as what happened specifically with Ihor and, according to the various testimonies collected by DN (and also by Quick this Friday), with other foreigners – I am referring to the attacks that would be perpetrated in the “little room” where there was no surveillance camera -, she was known to all the SEF at the Lisbon airport. It was impossible not to be, since any inspector could enter at any time. And it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t from the Lisbon regional board and the national board itself.
It should also be said in this regard that if the national leadership of the SEF did not know the specific crimes perpetrated in the EECIT, as well as the totally unacceptable way in which people were treated, once again believing in the testimonies, in the “interviews” , as it does not exempt you from responsibility: It is a manifestation of total incompetence not knowing what is happening under his command at the main airport in the country.
The same applies to government supervision and the General Inspectorate of Internal Administration. The latter, which has the responsibility of supervising the SEF, never, as the DN learned, ever inspected the SEF at the capital’s airport without prior notice. And the inspections that will have been carried out and the recommendations resulting from them so far have not been made public, despite the fact that the DN has already requested it on several occasions.
Despite the public uproar, some are still withholding information, concluding that either there were no serious inspections and consistent recommendations or, if so, they were not followed. In any case, what is known with certainty is that given the alerts and recommendations of the Ombudsman’s Office – which, by the way, could have been much more voracious in its work in favor of the human rights of the detainees of the SEF- the Ministry of Interior Administration. it did not move. He did not make an effort to change the law and procedures, he did not call the SEF leadership to stone. I let it go.
And that, I’m sorry, Minister Eduardo Cabrita, is not the work of a human rights defender. Is not the same.
As is not the case with the union leaders of the SEF who now come to certify that the problem is the bad apples and not all the police. Unionists who have never heard of such abuse and illegality. That they never realized that there were comrades with prohibited weapons, I mean the batons that two of those accused of the murder of Ihor Homeniuk carried with them and that one of them wielded when entering the room where the Ukrainian citizen was, and that according to testimonies of PJ inspectors many more own and boast on a daily basis. They have never heard of threats to lawyers, of “muscular” interviews, of the beatings now reported in the EECIT in Lisbon and of the driving of planes in a wheelchair. Of everything that is so wrong and so outrageously against all principles of the rule of law and human rights that police officers are supposed to defend and represent was happening there.
There is no way back: When things get to this point it is not the isolated cases we are talking about, it is a method. SEF has become a machine of humiliation and aggression, a school of crime. And it became this because they allowed it. Because they wanted it to be.
It was this method, not chance, not bad apple rescue, that killed Ihor Homeniuk.
