34
EL HASKI v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT
applicant had not adduced any concrete evidence that would be capable of
giving rise in the present case to “reasonable doubt” as to the violence,
torture or inhuman or degrading treatment that had allegedly been inflicted
on the individuals interviewed in Morocco (see paragraph 36 above).
98. The Court, for its part, takes that view that since those statements
emanated from suspects interrogated in Morocco in the context of
investigations and proceedings following the Casablanca bombings of
16 May 2003, the above-mentioned reports established the existence of a
“real risk” that they had been obtained using treatment contrary to Article 3
of the Convention. It can be seen from those reports that ill-treatment for the
purposes of extracting confessions was widely practised against such
suspects.
In 2004 the United Nations Human Rights Committee thus expressed
concern about the numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment against
detainees in Morocco, as did the United Nations Committee against Torture,
which specifically noted the increase in those allegations that implicated the
National Surveillance Directorate (see paragraphs 50 and 52 above). In its
final observations on the fourth periodic report of Morocco – adopted,
however, after the domestic courts had given a final decision in the
applicant’s case –, the Committee against Torture reiterated that concern,
mentioning more particularly the use of such treatment during interrogations
of individuals suspected of terrorism with the aim of extracting confessions
from them. It further referred to allegations that pointed to a consistent
pattern, “whereby suspects [were] arrested by plain-clothes officers who
[did] not clearly identify themselves, taken in for questioning and then held
in secret detention facilities, which in practice amount[ed] to
incommunicado detention. The suspects [were] not officially registered and
[were] subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment. They [were] held in these conditions for weeks at a time
without being brought before a judge and without judicial supervision. Their
families [were] not notified of their arrest, of their movements or of their
whereabouts until such time as they [were] transferred to police custody in
order to sign confessions that they ha[d] made under torture. It [was ] only
then that they [were] officially registered and their cases [were] processed
through the regular justice system on the basis of falsified dates and
information ...” (see paragraph 51 above).
In addition, it can be seen from the report of Human Rights Watch that
many of the suspected Islamists who were detained in the weeks following
the Casablanca bombings “were held for days or weeks in secret detention,
where the police subjected them to various forms of illtreatment and in
some cases to torture in order to extract confessions” (see paragraph 53
above). The FIDH reported numerous cases of arbitrary detention in secret
centres, where the interrogations were “carried out in breach of the Body of
Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or
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