In a statement issued yesterday, the organisation said it is growing weary of the continued labelling of all criticisms against the administration as being illegitimate. Red Thread took aim at the report into the torture of a teenage boy by police ranks saying that public confidence in the force has been eroded. The body noted that whatever the findings, its position remains that the President was wrong to task the police with the investigation, and that he was also wrong to limit the probe to the single incident.
“….It is wrong for the enquiry to be framed in such a way that the culture that permits and encourages the torture that one minister of government famously called ‘roughing up’ will remain untouched. If the system was working as the law says, the police would not have had a chance to torture the boy,” Red Thread stated. Further, it said that if the system was not dysfunctional and “its dysfunctionality at least tolerated”, the internal police mechanisms would have kicked in resulting in the boy’s lawyer having access to him at the station and or someone at the station intervening before his genitals was set alight.
According to Red Thread, the state is trying to draw an indelible line between the torture of the boy and all the previous, credible allegations of torture and murder levelled against the police and army, as well as the other previous, credible allegations of brutality against the prison service, the police and army. “Those other acts of brutality were not, after all, against a child; they could be justified simply by calling the victims criminals,” the body stated.
Continuing on the issue, Red Thread said, the letter which the medical officer who examined the teenager boy wrote to lambaste the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) for “its legitimate criticism” of his treatment of the child exposed the culture of violence in the security apparatus by showing that he (the doctor) saw nothing wrong with administering medical treatment to a prisoner with a hood over his head or “with not acting to ensure that the prisoner was taken to a hospital for medical treatment he himself thought was needed”.
The body said three low-level policemen have been charged with unlawful and malicious wounding in the case involving the teenage boy, and that one senior policewoman has been transferred “in what some fear might be scapegoating”.
Red Thread also referenced the murder of Dweive Ramdass saying that in neither case has the punishment gone high enough. It added that the action taken in both cases did not begin to address the changes and disciplinary action needed to redress the problems in the security system.
The group also questioned the status of the investigations into the whereabouts of Ricky Jainaraine who disappeared in August in a boat collision which left his father Jainaraine Dinanauth and Henry Gibson dead. It asked about the lack of concern for speedy justice for the boy’s mother.
With regard to the opposition, Red Thread expressed its disgust with the failure of Parliament to give personal violence in personal relationships the same priority it gives to public violence. It added that its support for the call by the joint opposition for an international inquiry into all the public violence of recent years does not lessen its disgust.
