Declaration by Mauro Palma*
One activity to prevent torture and other forms of maltreatment of persons deprived of liberty is doubtlessly to make the phenomenon known. These sad and cruel practices, far away from being overcome, must be exposed in their particular context, in their aims and their effects. Only knowing about torture its refusal can be built, consolidated as well as the conviction of the absolute necessity to prohibit it strengthened.
Giving back voice to the victims, helping them to reconstruct their drama, listening to them, is part of their recovery because it gives them the possibility to find some usefulness within the negativity of the experience they suffered: to contribute to stop its repetition.
Therefore the organisations and institutions which have the task to combat and prevent torture, keep underlining two necessities which go together: punish the ones responsible and guarantee to the victims forms of recovery. Thus the possibility to freely travel to make one’s story known is crucial.
Therefore one is left perplex by the fact of the refusal of visa by Italy to the Iraqi citizen Haj Ali, the icon of the actuality of torture depicted with the hood and the electrodes clipped onto his body – pictures which by the mass media entered all houses. His presence in Italy would have had exactly the sense to hold public meetings to recount his story.
The adopted apparent bureaucratic motivation – the impossibility to issue visa in Jordan where he holds no long term residence – can not be credibly sustained because it would imply the necessity to return to Iraq to ask for visa, with the obvious consequences. The given motivation seems more as a underestimation of the gravity of the treatment suffered by him and as lacking will to co-operation to eradicate such experiences from today’s world.
Form the very beginning Italy has ratified the conventions of the UN against torture as well as the European convention for is prevention. Therefore it has assumed international commitments to co-operate in order that “nobody is submitted to torture or inhumane or degrading treatment”. For that reason one expects from its central and peripheral organs a consequent attitude and a positive commitment to contribute to every initiative which strengthens the struggle against torture.
The Italian government and the governments of the other European countries where analogous visa requests have been made must swiftly find the appropriate way to give the torture victim Haj Ali access to Europe and thus allow to him to divulge his dramatic experience.
Mauro Palma
Italian representative European Committee for Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Strassbourg
