| AGRESSION DATE | VICTIM | PLACE | OUTCOME | LINK |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1981.05.05 | SANDS, Bobby | Maze, County Down, Northern Ireland | Died of starvation after a hunger strike in a prison cell | Read |
16 February 2023, Barcelona
The police officer’s activity was documented from May 2020 to October 2022, thanks to an investigation conducted by the newspaper, La Directa.
On 31 January 2023, five of the activists, human rights defenders and union rights affected by the police operation, started criminal proceeding against the police officer for: systematic sexual abuse, torture and offences against moral integrity, the crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets, and constrainting their civic rights, including a breach of freedom of association. Criminal charges, which have also been filed against the police officer’s superiors, count on the legal support of Irídia – Centre for the Defence of Human Rights and the CGT (General Confederation of Labour Union).
In light of the seriousness of these violations, the organisations and collectives undersigned state that:
This is not an isolated case. Although this kind of infiltration should be considered an exceptional resource, subject to very strict and specific conditions, the infiltration of police officers into social and political movements is a practice that has also been used in other countries. Particularly noteworthy is the precedent set in the United Kingdom, where, in 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal concluded that the deployment of Mark Kennedy, an undercover officer who had had relations with several women, one of them lasting more than six years, violated five fundamental human rights: the prohibition on torture and/or inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a private and family life, freedom of expression, freedom of association and assembly, and the prohibition on discrimination, in this case on grounds of sex.
These events show that all citizens and associations are at risk of becoming victims of these arbitrary and abusive violations. In this way, the use of such operations intimidates and has a chilling effect on citizens, significantly restricting civil society’s political space. As in the UK, this case should generate public debate on the limits and control of policing in a state governed by the rule of law and democracy.
The undersigned organisations note that the Spanish state has crossed a lines in terms of the violation of fundamental rights, exploiting intimate and sexual relationships to monitor political dissident. It is essential to expose, name, and challenge this type of police strategy, integrated into a state policy, as well as the specific gender-based violence it entails, in order to demand truth, justice, reparation and, above all, prevent these events from happening again.
It is important to remember that international law establishes a duty on state to investigate effectively and thoroughly in order to comply with their obligations to the victim and, also, to society, in their obligation to prevent future violations, as take action in the face of the most serious human rights abuses.
UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association noted, in his follow-up mission to the UK in 2017, that such operations can cause profound and irreparable harm, both “to the survivors and to the well-being of the general population with respect to the free of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of given the increased of mistrust” resulting from the public awareness of the case. He noted that in these cases “the harm can only be partially remedied through a process of real and transparent accountability for those affected, as well as reparation.”
[Download the Statement]
The family of a Belgian-Tunisian woman found dead in a Brussels police cell deny the official line that she died by suicide and have asked the Tunisian government to conduct its own investigation, openDemocracy has discovered.
Two other people of North African descent died in the same police station in 2021, when the UN expressed concerns about “police-related racial violence” in Belgium.
On 11 January, Sourour Abouda went for lunch and drinks with colleagues at a Portuguese restaurant in Brussels to celebrate the new year. At 8:34am the following day, the 46-year-old social worker and mother was found dead in a police cell.
“We talked a little, we laughed a little, and then I didn’t see her again,” said Fabrice Gérard, who knew Sourour and saw her at another café the same night. Gérard is also a journalist reporting on the story for RTBF, Belgium’s French-language public radio and TV service.
According to Gérard, the police told Sourour’s family that she died by suicide, using her sweatshirt to strangle herself, but the family refutes this.
“Her family said she never made any suicidal indications in the past. She would have never left her son alone,” the family’s lawyer Selma Benkhelifa told openDemocracy. “Suddenly, in a police [cell], she decides to kill herself without any apparent reason? It’s very strange.”
The public prosecutor’s office also claimed that “the death could correspond to a suicide”. “Based on the initial findings and the provisional autopsy report, it would seem that there was no third-party intervention,” a spokesperson said on 16 January.
A judicial investigation into Sourour’s death by Belgium’s police watchdog, known as Committee P, is currently underway.
Benkhelifa and the family have not seen a police report, CCTV footage from the night Sourour was arrested, surveillance footage of her cell, or a post-mortem report.
Sourour’s sister Soumaya told openDemocracy that the family was busy arranging a burial for Sourour in Tunisia and also trying to set up a “counter investigation” there, because “the Belgian state isn’t helping us”. They are currently waiting for the results of a second post-mortem.
Sourour is the third person of North African descent in two years to be found dead in a prison cell at the same Brussels-Capital-Ixelles police station, which is located on Rue Royale in City of Brussels municipality.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that we see deaths occur in a cell in this police station, which implies that serious things have happened,” wrote Allan, Sourour’s 19-year-old son, in an Instagram post four days after his mother’s death.
A spokesperson from the Tunisian embassy in Brussels told openDemocracy last week: “The embassy is in continuous contact with the family of the deceased and the Belgian authorities (federal and regional) to find out the exact circumstances of the death of the Tunisian national Sourour Abouda, as soon as possible.”
The police arrested Sourour at about 6am on 12 January in the chic district of Châtelain in Ixelles, a suburb south-east of Brussels, for public intoxication and disturbing public order, according to Gérard’s reporting. She was handcuffed and placed into a cellule de dégrisement, or sobering-up cell, at the Rue Royale police station.
Belgian law says that an intoxicated person causing public disorder, or appearing as a threat to themselves or others, can be detained for up to 12 hours in order to ‘sober up’. They must also receive medical attention, if needed. Police cells are designed to make injury, self-harm and suicide difficult, but the police are expected to continuously video-monitor the detainee.
“But [Sourour] didn’t see a doctor,” said Benkhelifa. “Why did the police officers whose duty it was to take care of her not watch the cameras? The station was supposed to protect her from herself.”
The mayor of Ixelles told local media he had read Sourour’s police report. It said she was arrested in a car after the vehicle’s owner had called the police because Sourour, who was drunk and incoherent, had refused to get out of the car, according to the mayor. She was then taken to the police station to sober up.
As soon as the police report becomes publicly available, Benkhelifa plans to file a civil lawsuit against the police for failing to protect Sourour while she was in their custody.
In 2021, two Algerian men in their 20s died in unexplained circumstances in the same Brussels police station as Sourour.
Ilyes Abbeddou, 29, was found dead in his cell in January, the afternoon after his arrest. Mohamed Amine Berkane, 26, was found dead in December, nine hours after his arrest. Amine’s friend, who was detained at the same time, said: “In the police station, the police know where the cameras are; they hit us when they know they won’t be filmed.”
There are still no answers as to how Ilyes and Amine died. Committee P is handling both of these ongoing judicial investigations. In both cases, the prosecutor’s office has ruled out the intervention of a third party (as it has in Sourour’s case).
But a spokesperson for the Observatory of Police Violence in Belgium (ObsPol) told openDemocracy: “The fact that three deaths occurred in the same police station cannot be considered an ‘accident’… Especially since in these three cases, they were people of North African origin.”
ObsPol, which regularly receives testimonies from victims of police violence, said it hoped the investigation into Sourour’s death would be “honest”, adding: “We believe it is not only the person who committed the acts that should be sanctioned, but also the system that allows him to do so and that often keeps silent.”
Belgian activists have long pointed out that ethnic profiling by the police is almost normalised, while the 2021 report on Belgium by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern over “police-related racial violence” and “persistent racial profiling”.
CERD recommended that the country “take measures to ensure prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into all allegations of racist incidents caused by or involving the police”, and also that it should diversify its police force.
The public prosecutor’s office in Charleroi, south of Brussels, has just announced that police officers will not be put on trial for the death in 2018 of a Slovakian national, Jozef Chovanec, after he sustained injuries in police custody.
Images leaked in 2020 showed police officers laughing as one female officer made a Nazi salute, while another sat on Jozef’s rib cage for 16 minutes. A 2021 report said he had died of self-inflicted wounds.
Selma Benkhelifa, the Sourour family’s lawyer, believes there are parallels between Abouda’s death and the murder of George Floyd by white US police in Minneapolis in 2020.
An official post-mortem found that George, who was the same age as Sourour, had suffered a cardiac arrest while being restrained by police. But a second independent autopsy, requested by the family, revealed that he died from asphyxia – and that there were no underlying health issues that contributed to his death.
Both examinations, though, concluded that his death was homicide.
“We see that [state] pathologists and police work a lot with each other. They know each other,” she said. “It makes it difficult to know the truth.” She added that if, by contrast, the Tunisian government were to lead an investigation, “they would have no reason to lie”.
Benkhelifa – who is a member of the Progress Lawyers Network, which fights racial discrimination in the justice system – told openDemocracy that she had wanted to be a lawyer since she was a teenager to address this problem.
“If there are no sanctions, the message you give is that [the police] are free to do what they want – and that makes me very afraid,” she said.
On a rainy Sunday evening, three days after Sourour’s death, a candlelit vigil was held on the steps of the police station where she died. More than 300 people came to place candles, photos and memories of Sourour on the memorial, said the journalist Fabrice Gérard.
It was “strong and symbolic,” he told openDemocracy. “It was a moment of recollection, so it remained calm.”
Gérard, who has been reporting on police and justice in Belgium for 12 years, is in regular contact with Sourour’s family. “As long as there are no answers, it feeds into their feeling that the police are hiding something,” he said.
The vigil was organised by Sourour’s workplace, the socialist education organisation PAC. PAC has also set up an online donations page to support her son Allan, who she was “raising by herself”, and to cover funeral expenses. So far, it has raised more than €14,000 (£12,500).
Committee P and the Rue Royale police station have not responded to openDemocracy’s requests for comment.
[Source: openDemocracy]