A/HRC/13/39/Add.5 B. Why is torture inflicted? 1. Purpose of torture and reasons 58. Torture is always committed with a specific purpose. The pain and suffering inflicted is a means to achieve a certain aim as the examples in article 1 CAT indicate. (a) Extraction of a confession 59. While I came across a variety of purposes for which persons had been tortured, the vast majority of cases were for the extraction of a confession. One detainee in Kazakhstan indicated that there where “people confessing to the killing of Kennedy”. Suspects are first intimidated and then threatened with ill-treatment in case of non-cooperation. Eventually, the person is tortured. The abuse can take place right after arrest or during transfer. In most cases however, it is inflicted at the police station; if not in the holding cells then in ordinary offices or locations notorious for its use for interrogations and ill-treatment. 60. In most countries visited, as well as in many other legal systems, the confession of a suspect holds a very prominent and very dangerous role when it comes to establishing criminal accountability. While the admission of guilt and the realization of having done something wrong is certainly significant to rehabilitate and reintegrate an offender, the ability to convict a suspect on the basis of a confession, without any further supporting evidence, is a major contribution to an environment conducive to torture. 61. While there are several factors to explain why torture is inflicted, it is important — partly in order to establish mechanisms preventing torture — to inquire into the motives of the individual perpetrator. The resort to torture becomes a tempting option for an individual police officer due to a fatal combination of various elements: 1) officers are under considerable pressure from their superiors, judges, prosecutors, politicians, the media and the general public to solve cases; 2) the lack of state of the art equipment or knowledge of modern investigation techniques (e.g. DNA evidence); and 3) the absence of safeguards, such as the de facto admissibility of evidence obtained under torture or non-representation by a lawyer during interrogation, make the extraction of a confession the most expeditious means of “solving” a case. Furthermore, in many countries I visited, perpetrators of torture were motivated by a profane mix of financial or professional self-interest. The advancement of one’s own job position and the promotion to a higher rank and salary is often dependent on the amount of cases solved. While in principle there may be some reasonable rationale behind such a link, this incentive makes the torturing of detainees a career-boosting exercise in a context which lacks any meaningful safeguards. Since anybody would say anything his or her tormentor wanted to hear in order to stop the pain, anybody can be convicted. In such a context, a confession is solely dependent upon the physical and mental strength of the victim, rather than an actual commission of the crime. As an indication of the prevalence of torture as a means to obtain a confession, in eleven of the fifteen countries I have visited, the police used torture in a widespread or even systematic manner against individuals in their custody. (b) Extraction of information 62. The use of torture to extract information other than a confession from a detainee is also widespread in many countries. Often detainees, whether in prisons or in police stations, were severely beaten in order to release names of co-perpetrators of ordinary crimes, and most of these victims were convicted for small offenses. As an example, numerous 19