BEIRUT: Justice Minister Shakib Qortbawi said Tuesday Lebanon has not implemented an international agreement it signed to prevent torture, but it is working to criminalize and punish torture.

“It is true that Lebanon signed the [United Nations] Convention Against Torture in 2000 and joined the [U.N.] Optional Protocol Against Torture in 2008, but honestly the agreement has not been practically implemented,” Qortbawi said this week at a meeting of an EU-funded project that works to fight and prevent torture and rehabilitate victims.

The U.N. protocol mandates that states prevent torture at home and not transport people anywhere abroad where there is reason to believe they will be tortured.

The optional protocol deals with the monitoring of detention sights.

Qortbawi said Lebanon was preparing the progress reports, now overdue, that the protocols require it to send to the U.N.

“The Justice Ministry will not hesitate to carry out its role in criminalizing torture and punishing its perpetrators,” he said, adding that tackling torture “does not contradict with fighting crime, especially since any investigation under physical or emotional pressure can be nullified.”

He said fighting torture also requires decent living conditions. “This requires modern prisons, detention centers and investigation rooms – which will require a large budget.”

Fateh Azzam, the Middle East representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that despite Lebanon’s signatures on the U.N. protocols, “there is a great need to make sure that the protocols are being implemented in reality.”

Qortbawi, Interior Minister Marwan Charbel and Health Minister Ali Hasan Khalil have all toured Lebanon’s largest prison, Roumieh, recently. Late last month Charbel called the condition of prisons in Lebanon “no longer bearable,” and referred to the health of inmates as a “miserable situation.”

A representative of Interior Minister Marwan Charbel, Charbel Mater, said that torture does take place in investigation rooms and detention centers.

“Everyone is responsible” for torture, he said, adding that this includes employees at places where investigations take place, as well as “lawyers who intervene to pressure a detainee and judges who exercise pressure on police investigators to hurry up or get a confession and turn a blind eye to a detainee in a miserable health situation that has resulted from beating or torture.”

He said the ministry “will be strict to the maximum with everyone who is proven to have been involved in ill treatment, and they will be prosecuted.”

Torture is widespread in the country, according to a report issued in December by Alef-Act for Human Rights on Lebanon’s progress toward upholding international conventions.

The report said over 700 cases were reported to a single NGO in the 2008-2009 period. Those most at risk include those in prison, non-Lebanese, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual individuals, drug addicts and women and children.