CAT/C/75 page 43 H. Investigation of reports of torture and punishment of those responsible 204. During its consideration of Mexico’s third periodic report, the Committee mentioned as a point of concern that “the ineffectiveness of efforts to put an end to the practice of torture is the result, inter alia, of the continuing impunity of torturers and the fact that the authorities responsible for the administration of justice continue to admit confessions and statements made under torture as evidence during trials, despite legal provisions explicitly declaring them inadmissible”.46 During their visit to the country the members of the Committee responsible for the inquiry received enough information to conclude that this criticism remains valid. 205. The indifference of the judicial authorities to the widespread use of torture has made the likelihood of even being put on trial, never mind convicted, a purely theoretical possibility for the culprits. Impunity appears to be the rule, not the exception. 206. Proving torture is one factor that does a great deal to ensure that cases reaching the courts go unpunished: despite the very clear terms of the provisions cited above, in real life Mexican judicial practice has shifted the burden of proof onto the victims of torture. It is the victims who have to show that their confessions were obtained under duress. Medical certificates recording injuries, while useful, are not necessarily decisive, since the individual making a claim has to prove that his injuries were occasioned by torture. Many of the detainees the Committee members met made this point, and were despondent that, being in detention and lacking the wherewithal to hire a lawyer to defend their cause properly, it was impossible for them to amass the evidence they needed to prove that torture had taken place. 207. Several of the State human rights commission chairmen to whom the Committee members spoke disagreed with the common practice among public prosecutors and the courts of amending charges. They said that cases which, in their recommendations, were classified as instances of torture were amended to offences carrying lesser penalties, such as abuse of authority or causing bodily harm. 208. One argument commonly employed to dismiss allegations of torture is that, according to forensic reports emanating both from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the penal establishments to which convicted individuals are committed, the accused’s injuries took less than a fortnight to heal. In most of the records of medical examinations that the Committee members examined while visiting several prisons, the time that the patient’s injuries would take to heal was one detail that was not left out. In most cases, the period indicated was less than 15 days. 209. Victims’ lawyers explained to the Committee members that the grounds invoked for refusing to categorize such cases as instances of torture derived from article 289 of the Federal Penal Code as it applied to the definition of torture in article 3 of the Federal Act to Prevent and Punish Torture. Article 289 of the Code lays down the penalties for causing bodily harm, stipulating that the lightest penalty shall apply “to anyone who inflicts on the injured party a non-life-threatening injury that heals in less than 15 days”; the remainder of the article specifies the penalties in the event that the injury takes longer to heal, and the penalties for other outcomes or consequences of physical injury are covered in the following articles. As a result, an injury of the least serious category covered by criminal law will not denote the offence of torture since the Federal Act, like the Convention, says that the effect of torture is to inflict “severe pain or suffering”. Of course, neither the Federal Act nor the Convention include in their definition of