The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) is setting up rehabilitation services for torture victims in Iraq with Danish support.
The project is based in Basra and aims to provide physical, psychological and legal rehabilitation services to some of the thousands of Iraqis who have been subjected to torture during and following Saddam Husseins regime, according to a press release from the organization Thursday.
As a first step, the IRCT has successfully held a three-day training seminar led by Dr. Suad Al-Saffar on rehabilitation of torture victims. 14 Iraqi health and 11 legal professionals from the Basra region and two professors from Basra University participated in the seminar, which took place in Kuwait between 28 and 31 March.
The training was the first component in the project “Reaching Torture Victims in Post-War Iraq: Co-ordinating and Facilitating Interventions to Deliver Rehabilitation services to Iraqi Torture Victims”.
The aim of the project is to provide assistance to 1.500 torture victims in the first year, and in the longer term the objective is to expand to Baghdad and northern Iraq in order to reach as many as possible of the hundreds of thousands of torture and trauma victims in the country.
The rehabilitation project in Basra is being implemented by IRCT and is supported by the Danish government with 1 million US dollar (app. 5,7 mio. dkr.).
For further information, please contact: Poul Struve Nielsen, Media Coordinator, Tlf. 33 76 06 49 or 23 34 55 09, e-mail: [email protected] or
Sune Segal, Programme Coordinator for Iraq, tlf. 0045 33 76 06 32 or 0045 28 10 88 66, e-mail: [email protected]
The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), Borgergade 13, P.O. Box 9049, DK-1022 Copenhagen K, Tel: 33 76 06 00, Fax: 33 76 05 00, E-mail: [email protected], www.irct.org
