CAT/C/TCD/CO/1
page 6
The State party should redouble its efforts to prevent, combat and punish sexual
violence and abuse against women and children. To this end, the State party should,
inter alia, and in collaboration with the United Nations Mission in the Central
African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) and United Nations specialized agencies in
the field:
(a) Conduct major information campaigns to raise awareness among the
population and all parties to the conflict that acts of sexual violence are offences
under criminal law, to break the taboos on sex crimes and to eliminate the
stigmatization and exclusion of victims, which discourages them from lodging a
complaint;
(b) Continue with, and reinforce, the deployment of the Détachement intégré
de sécurité (Integrated Security Detachment) (DIS) near sites for displaced persons
and camps for refugees in order to guarantee protection for them, especially for
women and children, to provide a simple mechanism for lodging complaints to which
all have access and to ensure that complaints are systematically and immediately
transmitted to the relevant authorities and that victims are protected;
(c)
Set up a rehabilitation and assistance scheme for victims;
(d) Amend Act No. 06/PR/2002 on the promotion of reproductive health to
include penalties for the perpetrators of sex crimes, or incorporate offences of sexual
violence in the Criminal Code, providing for penalties proportional to the seriousness
of the crimes;
(e) Ensure that customary laws and practices are not invoked to
justify violating the absolute prohibition of torture, as the Committee
recalled in its general comment No. 2 (2007) on implementation of article 2 by
States parties.
Obligation to investigate and right to complain
21. The Committee is concerned that the current Code of Criminal Procedure contains no
provisions authorizing the judicial authorities to launch investigations in prima facie cases of acts
of torture and ill-treatment. Moreover, the Committee is alarmed at information submitted by the
State party indicating that there is often no follow-up to complaints of torture brought to the
attention of the public prosecutor or investigating judge (art. 12).
The State party should revise the Code of Criminal Procedure to include clear
provisions on the obligation of the competent authorities to systematically launch
objective and impartial investigations, without consultation and without first
receiving a complaint from the victim, whenever there are reasonable grounds for
believing that an act of torture has been committed.