c) The Inter-American Court in further exposition of acts amounting to torture
found in the case hereunder that
“ the victims who were taken into illegal custody, beaten, and then killed and that
the beatings received, the pain of knowing they were condemned to die for no
reason whatsoever, and the torture of having to dig their own graves was part of
the moral damage suffered by the victims who died. Also the one victim who did
not die immediately also suffered the moral injury of bearing "the pain of his
wounds being infested by maggots and of seeing the bodies of his companions
being devoured by vultures” See Aloeboetoe Case, (Reparations), 15 Inter-Am.
Ct. H.R. (ser. C) para. 51 (1993
The Court therefore awarded compensation to the estate of the deceased victims
for their moral injuries classifying same as mental torture.
61. European Court of Human Rights.
In the case Selçuk and Asker v. Turkey (24 April 1998, Reports 1998-II) the
applicants complained that soldiers from Kulp, deliberately burned their homes
in İslamköy on 16 June 1993 and, ten days later, returned to burn the mill partly
owned by Mrs Selçuk. They forcibly entered and searched, and instructed them
to remove their possessions. However, while inside and trying to save their
furniture and belongings, the soldiers set fire to the house and had they not
escaped through a door to the barn at the back of the house, they would have been
asphyxiated. Furthermore villagers who attempted to extinguish the fire were
prevented from doing so by the soldiers. Consequently their house, barn and all
of their property, including their food stocks and poplar trees, were destroyed as
they watched helplessly.
62. The Court held that having regard to the manner in which the applicants’
homes had been destroyed, and namely to the fact that the exercise had been
premeditated and carried out contemptuously and without respect for the feelings
of the applicants, whose protests had been ignored concluded that it may therefore
be reasonably assumed the security forces burnt the applicants’ homes and
possessions with a view to causing them mental suffering, which has enabled the
Court to find a violation of Article 3 on that account (Article 3 is pari-materia
with article 5 of the Charter).
63. In another case, a village came under an indiscriminate attack when military
planes fired bombs over it destroying homes, possessions and killing the relatives
of some of the Applicants. The Government defended the act as necessary to
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