18 a) Testimony of Alain Abellard, a journalist He is a journalist, he has worked for “Le Monde” as the journalist in charge of the American region, from 1994 to 2003, and he is currently editor of that same newspaper. He has written several articles on prison conditions and detention of French citizens in Latin America, specifically in Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala. In 1997 he was contacted by a friend of Daniel Tibi, who mentioned the case to him. He was able to talk directly over a cell phone to Daniel Tibi, who was at the Centro de Rehabilitación Social de Varones of Guayaquil (hereinafter “Penitenciaría del Litoral”), in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Over the next two years, the witness wrote five articles on the prison situation in Ecuador, specifically on conditions at the Guayaquil penitentiary and on the detention of Mr. Tibi. His sources were Daniel Tibi and other inmates, members of the French diplomatic corps, Ecuadorian journalists, including the editor of the Ecuadorian newspaper “Hoy”, attorneys and authorities in that same country. In 1998 he visited the Penintenciaría del Litoral, where he was able to interview between twenty and thirty prisoners and to visit all cell-blocks in the prison, in addition to the clinic and the punishment area. The conclusions of that investigation were published in an article under the title “Midnight Express en Equateur”. In this article he asserted that arbitrariness, lack of sanitary conditions, ignored epidemics and widespread corruption were daily events for the 2,800 detainees in the Guayaquil prison. He called the conditions in that prison infernal, which reflects the Ecuadorian judicial system. He underlined that the case of Daniel Tibi exemplifies the level of corruption and the weakness of the judiciary in Ecuador. He pointed out that if Mr. Tibi had paid some money to the officials who dealt with the case, he would have been released. Mr. Tibi’s arrest was an outcome of the indiscriminate way in which the war against drugs is waged. Policemen receive payments based on the number of persons they detain. This created a perverse incentive that leads to detention of innocent persons, who are subsequently denied their basic procedural rights. His investigation showed that rights are “bought and sold” in prisons in Ecuador. b) Testimony of Michel Robert, a physician He studied “Etiopathy”, which is a scientific method to analyze and establish the causes of pathological phenomena. Said methodology uses ancestral techniques of bone repositioning to treat common injuries, trying to suppress the symptoms instead of treating them superficially, with the aim of returning the functions of the body through manipulation. The treatment he gave Mr. Tibi began in June 1998 and continued until December of that year. During the nine sessions in which Daniel Tibi attended the treatment, he noticed that he suffered severe physical problems, such as: lack of mobility of the back and neck, eyesight problems, face wounds, loss of texture and elasticity in the skin which reflected a degree of malnutrition, pain from the lumbar region down to both legs, the upper part of his back had severe tension points, and he suffered acute headaches. The patient could not sleep. He also noticed several scars on his