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In Pakistan, to be arrested is only the beginning....

For five days political activist Mohammad Sarwar was tied to a chair in a police station in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi and tortured till he agreed to confess to being involved in multiple robberies there. ''Investigators hit my toes with a hammer until I was ready to confess to crimes I never committed,'' Sarwar, 30, a former office bearer of the ethnic political party, Mohajir Quami Movement, said in an interview.

But that was not the end. A policeman in plainclothes then offered to set him free, without charges being registered, if he would pay 150,000 rupees (roughly 2,900 dollars). ''Since my life was in their hands, I had no other option but to give them the money,'' said Sarwar, who has been left with a permanent limp from that brush with the law. In police stations in Pakistan, like in other countries in South Asia, the use of torture is routine procedure to extract confessions.

Although prisoners have been known to be maimed or killed in custody, not one police official has been convicted. ''For lack of evidence, not even once has a police official accused of torture been punished by the court of law. Since it was inside the police station, victims could not furnish witnesses,'' says criminal lawyer Hashmat Ali Habib, a former secretary general of Amnesty International's Pakistan chapter. What is unpardonable is that in many cases the victims do not even know why they have been arrested. The most common methods of torture include beatings with a baton or whip, standing for hours with arms stretched to the side, hanging by the ankles, twisting the genitals, burning with cigarettes butts, and punches in the abdomen.

If they are women, chances that they will be raped in custody are very high. Pakistan is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, 1984, and Article 9 of its Constitution says that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with the law. Yet, the autonomous Human Rights Commission of Pakistan observed in its 1998 annual report that ''torture and police excesses while dealing with citizens remain as endemic as ever.'' The survivors suffer, for years in many cases, from anxiety, depression, a feeling of shame, guilt, impaired memory and concentration, headaches, sexual problems and many other things.

Instances of death in police custody from torture are routinely dubbed as suicides by the police. These get ''considerably less publicity'' than killings in police encounters which receive extensive coverage, comments the HRCP. ''One explanation could be that many such deaths occur in places away from major newspaper publishing centres,'' states the report, which documents at least 18 such cases in 1998. The police are armed with sweeping powers of detention, investigation and the framing of the charge sheet under laws enacted by British colonial rulers, although successive Pakistani governments have promised police reforms.

''Police still use draconian ways to torture suspects -- certainly domestic laws do not allow torture as a means of extracting a confessional statement ...,'' comments Zahid Yaqub Khawaja, a long time crime reporter with a domestic news agency. ''The police primarily torture for two reasons -- one is to extract bribes, and the second is to show efficiency, as a confession would mark the end of an investigation. If an accused backtracks on his confession in the court, then the court would order a judicial enquiry. In some remote areas, torture is also used as a way to make people conform,'' he adds.

Under Pakistan's laws, the police have to produce suspects before a judicial magistrate within 24 hours of their arrest and seek physical remand -- legal permission to extract evidence from the accused. However, the procedures are seldom followed. ''Since there is usually no record of who is taken in and released, nobody from outside the police station can prove any wrongdoing,'' said a police sub-inspector who naturally did not want to be identified.

Invariably too the majority of police torture victims, according to rights activists, are from the urban poor sections. They may be people leading precarious lives as migrants struggling for adequate livelihoods and decent living conditions in the city and pushed into the world of petty crime. Apart from lacking awareness about their rights, they don't have the money to fight their cases in court.

''If victims want to move court, they will have to pay 15,000 rupees (300 dollars) as court fees in addition to the lawyer and other expenses ... In most cases, the damages claimed remain less than the expenses on the perusal of a case,'' said lawyer Habib. Now Pakistan's nearly two-month-old military government has promised to reform the police, and make it ''people-friendly.'' Activists would like to see changes in the laws to ''curtail the powers of the police and make their working more transparent by introducing monitoring committees of citizens, lawyers and NGOs,'' according to Habib.

UNI

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