UN General Assembly
1985

The following are excerpts that appeared in The Canberra Times of Friday, 14 December 1984: "The Vietnamese-backed Government of Kampuchea routinely and brutally torture political prisoners, a United States human rights group said yesterday. A report by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights said, 'The rule of law is not respected in any serious sense in the People's Republic of Kampuchea' ... Beatings with truncheons, metal pipes or rifle stocks appeared to be the most common form of torture. Beatings were often supplemented with prisoners being suspended from ceilings, given electric-shock treatment, having plastic bags put over their heads, having powdered lye blown in their faces, and having metal contraptions tightened around their heads. Prisoners, estimated to number in the thousands, were often kept for months in windowless cells and forbidden to make any comment about the Vietnamese presence in their country, not even to cite it in their 'confessions'."