Drug Treatment Centre Slammed by Human Rights Watch
17 October 2011 at 11:03 am
Human Rights Watch said a treatment centre that the Australian government and charities have funded is abusing patients – including children.
The drug treatment centre in Laos has been accused of holding hundreds of people against their will – including beating inmates who try to escape.
Somsanga Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre on the outskirts of capital Vientiane is part funded by the Australian government who spent $US9300 building a library at the centre in 2009-10.
''The detainee guards beat them until they were unconscious. Some were kicked, some [beaten] with a stick of wood,'' the detainee told Human Rights Watch.
According to a report in The Age, Human Rights Watch compiled a 76-page report on the Lao centre which describes desperate detainees attempting suicide by ingesting glass, or by hanging.
Human Rights Watch urged donors and their implementing agencies to ensure no funding was supporting policies or programs that violated international human rights laws, including the prohibition on arbitrary detention.
International development agency, AusAid was implicated in another Human Rights Watch report which revealed that Australia's partly funded projects in Vietnamese detention centres where tens of thousands of drug abusers suffer torture and physical abuse and are held for years against their will and.
