**Spain must end the practice of holding suspects incommunicado, without access to lawyers and without informing their families, activists say.**Spain’s criminal law - among Europe’s strictest - allows all suspects to be held incommunicado for five days - and terror suspects for at least days.
Amnesty International says the system facilitates torture and breaches international human rights standards.
Spain has said its programme is a necessary counter-terrorism measure.
But the Spanish government has not yet given the BBC a specific response to the points made in Amnesty’s report.
Amnesty says that under the law, detainees cannot:
- Contact their own lawyer, but can only receive legal assistance from an appointed lawyer
- Consult any lawyer in private
- Have their family informed that they have been detained or where they are held, while foreign nationals cannot inform their embassy
- Choose to be examined by their own doctor, but can only use a state-appointed one
Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia programme director, said: "Incommunicado detention must be relegated to the past. No other European Union country maintains a detention regime with such severe restrictions on the rights of detainees.
“It is inadmissible that in present day Spain anyone who is arrested for whatever reason should disappear as if in a black hole for days on end. Such lack of transparency can be used as a veil to hide human rights violations.”
‘Blindfolded’
As early as 2004, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Theo van Boven, issued a report on Spain which said “prolonged incommunicado detention may facilitate the perpetration of torture and could in itself amount to a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.
Amnesty’s new report, Out of the Shadows, notes that both the UN special rapporteur on torture and the UN Human Rights Committee have urged Spain to abolish the practice.
It cites the case of Moroccan-born Mohammed Fahsi, who was arrested in Spain in 2006 and accused of belonging to a group which sent fighters to Iraq.
His UK-born wife, Khadija Podd, said she was not at home when he was arrested and that the police gave her no information about where he had been taken.
“For days and days it was like he had just vanished,” Amnesty quoted her as saying. “Nobody knew where he was. It wasn’t until two weeks after he was arrested that I got a phone call from him, in prison. He cried when he spoke to me.”
Mr Fahsi said that during his detention he was blindfolded, subjected to threats against his family, and not allowed to rest or sit down for a single minute.
He is due to stand trial in Spain later this month, said an Amnesty spokesman.