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Lebanon allowed a deadline to establish an anti-torture institution to pass and should quickly adopt measures to address the issue, human-rights groups said.
Human Rights Watch and a group of international and Lebanese advocacy groups complained Beirut let a Dec. 22 deadline pass for setting up a national committee to prevent torture.
Lebanon in 2008 signed the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention against Torture mandating mechanisms to examine conditions in national detention centers. Lebanese Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar moved earlier this year to embrace those mechanisms, but the matter has since stalled, the rights groups said.
"The Justice Ministry took an important step when it created the committee (to examine torture), but now it has to finish what it started," a joint statement read.
Lebanese law prohibits torture, though Islamic radicals and detained Israeli spies complained of ill treatment and physical abuse.
The human-rights groups called on the Lebanese government to criminalize all forms of torture and adhere to U.N. protocols on the ill treatment of prisoners.
"Lebanon deserves praise for acceding to the convention's optional protocol -- but only if it escapes the fate of other human rights instruments that Lebanon has ratified but never implemented," the groups said.
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