POLICE ORGANIZE WORKSHOP ON HUMAN RIGHTS

(Window Dressing Exercise By The Police)

We wanted to laugh but we cried instead when we read in The Rising Sun last week, Tuesday that a workshop on Human Rights was being held by the Seychelles Police at the Seychelles Police Academy at Pointe Larue. It is like getting the wolf to watch over the lamb. We can assure you that it is not a joke it did actually take place albeit in front of a sponsored crowd. The Commissioner of Police took centre stage and used the occasion to make some grand declarations. If the article in The Rising Sun was anything to go by, nothing new was said by Commissioner Waye-Hive on the matter of Human Rights that we haven’t heard before.

However, just a few short months ago Commissioner Waye-Hive had the perfect op-portunity to show that he was really serious about eliminating police brutality, maltreatment in custody and disproportionate use of ﬁrearms, but he failed misera-bly. This was when members of the force abused their position of power and tortured a young man they had arrested as a suspect in a case. It turned out the young man was completely innocent of the crimes he was being ac-cused of. The young man ended up in hospital in intensive care with severe injuries to his body, face and legs as a result of the beatings he received at the hands of the ofﬁcers. The ofﬁcers responsible were quickly suspended to appease the ensuing public outcry. The ofﬁcers involved bragged in public that they will soon be re-instated back in the force. It did not take long before all ﬁve ofﬁcers involved in the incident were back in full uniform ply-ing their evil trade on behalf of the Com-missioner. In another incident this time at Cascade a police of-ﬁcer known for his trigger happy mental-ity shot at and severely injured another young man for no apparent reason. The culprit in-volved in that particular incident is still very much involved with the police force. This is only two of many recent incidents involv-ing police brutality, human rights violations and disproportionate use of ﬁrearms.

The ﬁve-day-workshop was a farce and a mockery to Human Rights organization locally and internationally. It was organized as a window dressing exercise to give much needed credibility and publicity to the local police force, and a semblance at adhering to Judge Reilly’s report. It is this ind of exercise which makes the police force a comical out-ﬁt not worthy of the uniform they wear. The Commissioner of Police had the perfect oppor-tunity to make a stance for Hu-man Rights - he failed allowing his ofﬁcers to walk free without charge to carry-on as if nothing had happened. The speech giv-en by the Commissioner at the workshop was a contradiction in itself. The Commissioner started his address well by calling for the bad prac-tices to stop and called for stricter control and more accountability for police actions. However in a com-plete ﬂig-ﬂop (turn around) further into his speech the Commissioner defended the actions of the perpetra-tors by stating that “there will always be those who complain no matter what the police do. There will al-ways be complaints which are perceived as frivolous or vexatious.” He said.

Mr. Commissioner this is why complaints need investigating to establish merit. The investi-gation should be conducted by a body independent of the police force, which is currently not the case.

It goes to show that the Com-missioner of Police lacks the ba-sic understanding that the police force is here to serve the people and not the other way round. And for him to turn around and attack the victims for complain-ing he is sending out the wrong signal to the Human Rights violators within his force. Like Mugabe said to Tony Blair once “keep your Britain and your gays and I will keep my Zimbabwe”. The Commissioner is literally telling the public to “keep their complaints and he will keep his police force inclusive of the hu-man rights violators”. Sad!

(Contributed by victims of torture)