Three decades after the ground-breaking Convention Against Torture was adopted by the United Nations in 1984, Amnesty International (AI) on Tuesday blamed countries including Sri Lanka and India for betraying their commitments to end torture within their territories.

The human rights watch body launched a global campaign “Stop Torture” to combat widespread torture and other ill-treatment in the modern world.

Lashing out at the states who failed to curb torture, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty said “governments around the world are two-faced on torture – prohibiting it in law, but facilitating it in practice.”

According to the campaign’s media briefing, police forces in Sri Lanka and other countries including China, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and India at times torture individuals during interrogation and pre-trial detention, often forcing detainees to “confess” to a crime.

The briefing further claimed that thousands of men and boys in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and nearby areas are arbitrarily arrested and held in secret detention centres, where reports of torture are widespread.

“For the first five days they beat us constantly with leather belts across our backs, the pain was too much to describe. They would threaten to kill me if I didn’t confess to being part of the Taliban,” the AI briefing quoted one of such detainees as saying.

As part of the campaign Amnesty International commissioned a Globescan survey to gauge worldwide attitudes to torture.

Excerpt from report on Lanka;

Authorities in Sri Lanka still routinely torture detainees. In 2012 at least five people died as a result of torture and police brutality; Sri Lanka’s National Human Rights Commission registered 86 complaints of torture in the first three months of 2013 alone. The government makes liberal use of a draconian anti-terror law to detain people arbitrarily for long periods.