Anti-torture advisors need 1 million lei

The Advisory Council against Torture (ACT), the new body set up to counteract the phenomenon, needs over 1 million lei in 2009 to work efficiently, Ivan Cucu, the president of the Council told a seminar called “Torture in Moldova – What is going on?” on June 23, Info-Prim Neo reports . He suggests that the state should finance the ACT's activity, without getting involved into its activity. Initially, one of the principles insisted on was that the members should depend on the state financially, and work without remuneration. Ivan Cucu says the money is necessary to visit police commissariats and jails. Now the ACT organizes by three visits a week to those institutions, what is too little. According to him, the ACT members should be remunerated on grounds they are subjected to noxious labor conditions when they visit TB patients. The ACT aims to make the jails more open to be controlled by the civil society and that is why it itself should be a transparent and open agency, he said. The ACT was instituted by the Parliament on July 26, 2007, within the Human Rights Center from Moldova, with the purpose to create a national mechanism to prevent torture, thus fulfilling the provisions of the Optional Protocol of the UN Convention against Torture. The ACT is formed of 10 representatives of the civil society and an ombudsman.