A/HRC/8/52 page 173 517. The Arab Commission for Human Rights, also speaking on behalf of Al Karama for Human Rights, regretted that the most important recommendations of the Working Group and of the treaty bodies have not been supported by Algeria. The Arab Commission for Human Rights stressed that enforced disappearances, torture, summary executions and extrajudicial executions are neither anecdotal nor occasional but crimes against humanity due to their widespread and systematic nature. It suggested ratification of the Rome Statute with a view to putting an end to impunity as enshrined in a decree issued by the executive branch. It also raised concerns about the state of emergency and powers accorded to the Department for Information and Security, which had led to the death of 200,000 people and the disappearance of more than 10,000 others. 518. Amnesty International welcomed the responsiveness of Algeria to the recommendations of the Working Group to protect detainees from torture and other ill-treatment; to strengthen efforts to protect women’s rights; to ensure the rights of detainees, including access to a lawyer; and to cooperate with the special procedures. Amnesty International further expressed serious concern about a persistent pattern of secret detention and torture by the Department for Information and Security, and about discrimination against women in the Family Code and continuing reports of violence against women, including in the family. 4. Views expressed by the State under review on the outcome and concluding remarks 519. In reply to the questions raised during the meeting, the delegation of Algeria said that the impunity which, according to some speakers, was implicit in the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was nowhere to be found in that text, which the Algerian people had accepted by means of a referendum on 29 September 2005. It was that sovereign choice by millions of Algerians that alone gave the Charter its legitimacy, and the Algerian delegation wondered what kind of legitimacy could be claimed by the non-governmental organizations that sought to call that choice into question. That, in the delegation’s view, was something that contrasted starkly with the elementary and intangible rules of democracy that drew their strength from choices made by a majority of the community. The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was a national patriotic response aimed at putting an end to fratricide, bringing those who had gone astray back into line, isolating the radicals and casting a spotlight on those who had misappropriated religion for their own purposes and those zealots who had, through their erroneous interpretation, violated the Holy Koran and the right to life of tens of thousands of innocent people. 520. Non-governmental organizations could not, in the name of ethics or morality, help to prosecute the bloodletting by casting doubt on an effort to bring about peace and reconciliation. The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation was considered by some legal experts to be a form of transitional justice that represented the passage from a complex situation of crisis to one of relief in which the consequences of the national tragedy brought on by terrorism were addressed. It was in that spirit that Algeria had endorsed the Working Group’s recommendations that priority should be given to tolerance and reconciliation. 521. The question of disappeared persons was a painful one for Algerian society. No family had been untouched by that phenomenon or was unaware of it. It was the direst consequence of the national tragedy confronting Algeria and one that the country was endeavouring to address through humanitarian, legal and social means. In other cases where States had planned,