In their reports on Lebanon,
Amnesty International and the UN Human Right Committee, voiced
reservations and were critical of the Lebanese judicial
apparatus.
Essentially, the reports
concentrate on the structure and the action of this apparatus
and its impact on the victims.
The Reports highlighted two
main aspects and denounced practices in force:
1 -The Competence
There are judicial
structures in Lebanon that are not compliant to articles of
the Human Rights Declaration. The military court has been used
to deal with many cases concerning civilians. This is illegal
and unacceptable, because these cases do not fall under the
expertise of this courthouse whose exclusive role consists of
dealing in cases linked to the military and army members.
Under the pretext of “safeguarding the
national security”, the scope and nature of the military
court’s jurisdiction has become inconsequential.
Furthermore, the setup of the military
courts does not guarantee in any way the rights of the
accused. On this basis, neither the law nor the constitution
gives the right to exercise such an authority on behalf of the
military body.
To understand better the bias against the
accused, it is important to note that a Lebanese military
court is presided over by a military senior officer, and is
comprised of military people without any judicial experience
or background.
Many times these “judges” do not
perform any judicial acts until the declaration of a capital
punishment (still applicable in Lebanon); the irregularities
reach their paroxysm when one learns that judgments given by
military courts are often not justified or backed by any
evidence.
The course of such litigation at a
courthouse is often botched in the sense where lawyers are
stopped from exercising their mission and where functions and
decisions seem to be made in a rush and without due process.
This “Court” doesn't recognize any
independent recourse or any civil jurisdiction authority.
2 -The Judicial Court
The government refers directly cases to the
judicial court, away from the appropriate channels, a fact,
which makes the case open and vulnerable to political
interference.
The main problem with the actions of this
court lies in the fact that it doesn't admit, nor recognize
any other possible recourse or appeal; its judgments are
definitive and include the pronunciation of capital punishment
which contravenes international convention on the subject and
violates the article 14 of the Declaration of Human Rights.
On that, Amnesty International and the UN
Human Right committee asked the relevant Lebanese authorities
to proceed to a global and exhaustive reexamination of the
judicial system in practice: structure, domains of competence,
ways of recourse, penal code etc.
1- It is worth mentioning that a big
majority of Lebanese Forces members suffered the experience of
detention and torture in the basements of the Ministry of
Defense. The treatment reserved for detainees varies between
escalating methods of torture.
The physical and psychological cruelty was
adopted regularly in order to secure and extract false
confessions. Very often Intelligence service agents are provided
with blank warrants to fill according to their “needs” and
arrest people without due process. After their horrific
experience, victims lucky enough to be released are obliged to
sign a declaration, committing themselves never to exercise any
political activity or attend any gathering of more than four
people at a time.
2- Military intelligence agents conduct
all arrests and preliminary investigations; this constitutes a
serious infringement to the code of the penal procedure. The
attitude of the judicial authority complicates the situation as
it is always supporting the illegal activities of the military.
In fact it does not only cover for them but also adapts to the
letter the initial contents of the investigations performed
under torture. These usually constitute the essence of the
fabricated Scenario.
It is important to reiterate that indictments
are essentially founded on these “confessions” and on the
false testimonies delivered by suspects or detainees.
Considering the conditions of detention and
interrogation, one cannot doubt that these “pieces of
conviction” are biased.
Amnesty International declared that the
Lebanese government had recourse to political arrests and
political judgments. This process does not at all adhere to
internationally recognized criteria. Amnesty International cited
the case of the Lebanese Forces and Dr. Samir Geagea as an
example: “During this process those accused delivered
declarations in the setting of the initial interrogations;
thereafter they certified and insisted that these declarations
were extracted from them under torture. The court refused to
give these reversals the due process and treated them as if they
had never been mentioned. They did not refer them to any
independent authority”.
In the report on its ‘‘Mission of
investigating the state of human rights in Lebanon’, the
International Federation of Human Rights League (FIDH) writes:
“the commission of investigation has been shocked to hear a
senior magistrate of the military court relaying to a relative
the investigation file regarding the attack on Zouk church, and
telling him before arrests were made that the guilty could be
found among Christians linked to Israel’.
And the report of the FIDH concluded that
“the practice of the arbitrary arrests and the torture seems,
every day, to increase more and more while the political
interference in the judiciary has been multiplying; eventually
the absence of any international protest will only encourage the
government to slip further towards a more and more repressive
regime”.
“They start here with hanging a man, then
they Judge him” (Mr. Pourceaugnac).
