Guardian Alleges Abuse at UN-Funded Center for Phnom Penh Undesirables

Condensed from "Abuse Alleged at UN-Funded Detention Camp," by Ben Doherty, the Guardian, published in the Cambodia Daily on Nov. 1, 2010.  All text below is copyright Doherty/the Guardian.

     UN funding is being used to run a brutal internment camp for the destitute in Cambodia, where detainees are held for months without trial, raped and beaten, sometimes to death, former inmates have said.
     The Prey Speu facility, 19 km from Phnom Penh, is officially described as a "social affairs center" offering education and health care to vulnerable people.  But human rights groups and former inmates say the center is an illegal, clandestine prison, where people deemed "undesirable" by the government -- usually drug workers, sex workers and the homeless -- are held for months without charge.
     Men, women and children are housed together in a single building and are regularly beaten with planks, whipped with wires or threatened with weapons, according to witnesses.
     The UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has described the conditions at Prey Speu as "appalling," with people "illegally confined and subject to a variety of abuses of power by the staff that included sub-humane conditions of detention, extortion, beating, rape, sometimes resulting in death and suicide."  But the department that runs Prey Speu still gets money directly from the UN's children's fund, UNICEF, and the center is also supported by several international NGOs.
     According to the rights group Licadho, three Prey Speu detainees have been beaten to death in front of other inmates.
     Another five detainees have killed themselves, including two women who had been separated from their children.

[From the Webmaster: 
\     Similar allegations have also been made against Phnom Penh-area detention centers for drug addicts and for HIV-positive Cambodians.  
     As disturbing as the allegations are, it is my firm belief that exactly the same things are happening today in detention centers across the world, including juvenile prisons and immigrant detention centers in the world's wealthiest countries.  We must take solace in the fact that these unfortunate souls, while treated terribly by their government, have not been "disappeared," and that the voices of these wretches are heard by local and intenernational groups and media.]