In the aftermath of malaysiakini 's exclusive report of Keadilan Youth leader N Gobalakrishnan's torment while under ISA detention, we must question the highly unsatisfactory report by Suhakam commissioners who painted a wholly different picture to the public after meeting with the detainees.

Suhakam explicitly stated that the detainees were not physically abused. They would have us believe that the roughest treatment meted out, was when one detainee was pushed off a chair and prevented from lodging a police report.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as we read the account of the mental and physical abuse Gobalakrishnan had to endure until he was a weak, shivering shadow of his former self when visited by the Suhakam commissioners.

The fact that the interview with the detainees was carried out in the presence of their jailers who directed the line of questioning and whose very presence must have been intensely intimidating, is yet another failure of the commission to exercise its powers resolutely and fearlessly.

Does Suhakam have any powers at all? The granting of access, six long weeks after the commission requested for it, made a mockery of the body in spite of the fact that Suhakam has right of access under an Act of Parliament.

If Suhakam has no authority to even insist on proper and decent conditions while interviewing the detainees of which the most basic is being able to talk to them without their jailers and tormentors present, then we are led to the conclusion that it is a mere toothless pet rather than a human rights watchdog.

Having failed to properly ascertain the real treatment of the prisoners which must be painfully obvious to the commissioners, Suhakam should not have done the detainees a graver injustice and the establishment a big favour by painting a grossly misleading picture of their detention.

If Suhakam cannot do its job, it should dissolve itself instead of allowing itself to be used to rubber stamp and eyewash the abuses of the establishment. It should not exist to give Malaysians empty hopes of correcting human rights abuses when it has no hope of doing its job.