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Friday 29 October 2010

Cambodians Die at UN Torture Camp


Detainees and guards at Cambodia's Prey Speu detention centre. The government says it is a welfare centre, but human rights groups claim it is a brutal, clandestine, prison. Photograph: Ben Doherty.

by Tom McGregor
Dallas Blog
Fri, Oct 29, 2010,

At an alleged detention camp funded by the United Nations, Cambodians were beaten, raped and killed. Before being detained without trial, so-called “undesirables” were swept from the streets, as disclosed by human rights organizations.

The Guardian Unlimited UK reports that, “UN funding is being used to run a brutal internment camp for the destitute in Cambodia where detainees are held for months without trial, raped and beaten, sometimes to death, former inmates have told the Guardian.”

Officially described as a “social affairs center,” the Prey Speu Facility, 12 miles from the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, claims to provide healthcare and education to vulnerable people.

Yet, human rights groups and former inmates insist that the center is an illegal, prison camp, where people considered “undesirable” by the government – usually sex workers, drug users and the homeless – are taken into custody for months without charge.

As reported by the Guardian, “men, women and children are housed together in a single building and are regularly beaten with planks, whipped with wires or threatened with weapons, according to witnesses.”

Allegedly, the guards have tortured three inmates to death and gang rapes by the same body of men are reportedly common.”

Even the U.N.’s own office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) described the conditions as “appalling” with detainees “illegally confined and subjected to a variety of abuses of power by the staff that included sub-human conditions of detention, extortion, beating, rape, sometimes resulting in death and suicide.”

Nonetheless, the department that operates Prey Speu still gets cash directly from the UN children’s fund, Unicef and the center is also financed by several international NGOs.

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