Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Vovo Bossongo, an opposition-party member in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was dragged into a Kinshasa jail last January, the authorities skipped the usual beating. Instead, security agents poked the young woman with a 2-ft.-long shock baton whose electric jolts eventually left her unconscious. When Chinese prison guards tired of kicking Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso, they shoved a black clublike shock baton down his throat and charged it up. The current that raced through his body left him crumpled on the floor "in a pool of blood and excrement and in extreme pain," he recalls. In Lebanon...
...TIME review of Commerce Department documents shows that Washington has approved a dozen shipments of stun guns and shock batons over the past decade to Saudi Arabia despite that country's long history of brutalizing prisoners. American firms must obtain a Commerce Department license to export shock weapons to most countries, and officials say the applications are closely screened to block the items from falling into the hands of human-rights abusers. Yet Air Taser has been negotiating to supply thousands of electric-shock riot shields for crowd control to police in Turkey, where torture is "widespread," according to State...
Obviously much depends on how the devices are used. Even in the U.S., the record of shock weapons is far from unblemished. Prison guards in California, Arizona and Texas have been accused of tormenting inmates with stun batons. Five states have banned the devices. "It's one of those toys that enterprising manufacturers have developed that sound real good, but their potential for abuse is so great," says Armond Start, a professor at the National Center for Correctional Health Care Studies. And in the hands of a torturer, the "toy" can produce cruel, even fatal, results...
France may have convicted former Vichy government official Maurice Papon of complicity in crimes against humanity, but the nation?s mixed feelings about the Nazi era persist. ?The verdict is anticlimactic,? says TIME Paris correspondent Bruce Crumley. Papon was sentenced to 10 years in prison for deporting Jews to Auschwitz, but a two-year appeal process makes it unlikely the ailing 87-year-old will ever serve time...
According to its web page, SAHRDC "seeks to investigate, document and disseminate information about human rights treaties and conventions, human rights education, refugees, media freedom, prison reforms, political imprisonment, torture, summary executions, disappearances and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment...