Stop-Torture-Report

(Witness 91, speaking in 2015)
There are also cases where a parent, child or other close relative has been
threatened, physically abused, abducted, disappeared or even killed. In one
case an adult child was abducted and money extorted for his release. In
another case, a mother was threatened that if she did not agree to have sex
with a senior military officer, her young daughter would be raped instead. In
one instance a baby’s life was threatened by soldiers who forced its mother to
go to be raped by their superior officer.
Sometimes a reprisal attack is triggered when a witness asks about the
whereabouts of a disappeared family member or when they have witnessed the
killing of a family member. Often it is the elderly parents of young torture
survivors who are beaten, detained or in some cases disappeared or killed in
retaliation attacks.
Implications
These findings clearly raise serious concerns for diaspora groups, human rights
organisations, NGO’s and journalists who purposefully or inadvertently identify
a Sri Lankan torture survivor in public. Even if the survivor is considered to be
safe abroad, this research makes it clear his or her family inside the country is
still very much at risk. Witness protection in this context is not just about
removing the names of survivors from documentation. The authorities likely
have detailed records of the dates of every detention and place of abduction as
well as the background life and identifying details of each torture survivor. The
fact that they released the detainee on payment of a ransom does not mean
that the security forces will delete these records because the corruption is not
the action of one individual officer who needs to cover his tracks but rather
part of a systemic institutionalised corrupt system involving multiple wings of
the security forces.
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