56 Part II: Challenges and opportunities jails. Despite this, investigations are often closed for lack of evidence. Contributing to this situation are a lack of thorough post-interrogation examinations, minimal physical traces from torture and intimidation of victims to waive their medical examination. The Philippine Medical Association (PMA) admits that few doctors are aware that torture is a gruesome reality among prisoners and suspected political dissidents, and most are unfamiliar with identifying torture and rehabilitating victims. Moreover, the Istanbul Protocol is not commonly used among medical professionals in the Philippines. The Medical Action Group (MAG), a national health and human rights NGO, launched a 2004 campaign, National and Regional Training of Jail and Health Personnel on Recognition, Documentation and Reporting Cases of Torture, supported by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and the British Embassy in Manila. Its objectives were to: 1. Train jail and health personnel on human rights and international conventions; 2. Develop guidelines on torture prevention to be presented to national agencies for policy adoption; 3. Develop information, education and communication materials for advocacy against torture; 4. Develop a torture documentation and reporting manual and posters stipulating Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) in English, Filipino, and Cebuano, which were widely distributed to detention centres in the Philippines; and 5. Establish a network of jail and health professionals to help document torture. Workshops were held for municipal and city health officers, doctors serving in detention centres, lawyers and prison authorities. At the project’s end, MAG and the CHR produced the Manual on the Recognition, Documentation, and Reporting of Torture, which contains an adapted Istanbul Protocol documentation format, reporting flow-chart and basic guidelines on how to send communications to complaint mechanisms. In addition, guidelines on preventing torture in custody were

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