Most of countries in the world have signed and ratified the CAT and other international human rights treaties and conventions. Inflicting torture on someone does not end without consequences. Both international and national law instruments oblige countries and governments to search for persons suspected to have committed torture acts and bring them before justice.
Countries have a duty to enact legislation that prohibits acts of torture and other forms of ill-treatment and punish those who commit them and those who order them to be committed. Individual perpetrators, thus, can be held criminally responsible for committing these crimes. According to the Article 4 of the CAT, all countries must ensure that all acts of torture are regarded as offences under their criminal law, including attempts to commit torture and any acts by any person that constitute participation or complicity of torture.
States are obliged to punish these acts in an appropriate manner, as well as to establish jurisdiction over the acts of torture where the offences are committed in any territory under their jurisdiction, or where the alleged offender or the victim is a national of the country.
Additionally, countries are obliged to search for persons suspected to have committed acts of torture and make torture an extraditable offence in any extradition treaty they sign with other country. As already mentioned, torture methods are ineffective interrogation tool and evidence extracted from torture cannot be used as evidence. Under Article 15 of the CAT, any statement made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceeding, unless it is used against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.
There is a common misconception that generally torture is linked solely to issues of counter-terrorism and national security due to high profile torture cases around the world. However, according to research conducted by the Amnesty International, torture can happen to anyone , including people from ethnic minorities, student activists, protesters, petty criminals, and to those people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In most cases it is marginalized and poor people who get beaten, raped by police and humiliated, with no one to hear their cries for help and help them. It does not take long for one to conclude that torture acts are cruel, immoral and dehumanizing. According to advocates against torture, torturers rather treat as a thing than a person.
That means that they dehumanize their victims to make it easier to torture them. Torturers use the physical body of the victim as a tool to achieve their goals and not as component part of a person.
They also use torture to destroy the autonomy of the victim. For example, some societies have use different torture methods to suppress independent and individual thinking and force people to adopt the desired way of thinking. In these cases, victims are tortured until they accept to abandon their own belief systems and views and adopt those of their torturers.
Torture, in this way, violates the human dignity and rights of the victim. However, the acts of torture do not only harm the victims, but it also damages the moral reputation of the government and institution that carries it out.
The use of torture by an institution can lead to internal dissent and damage its integrity. The use of torture spun completely out of control in the campaign of the Inquisition against heresy, cases of witchcraft and political crimes, becoming the principal means to extort confession.
The records of trials conducted throughout Europe in the 16th and the 17th century testify to the numerous tragic verdicts reached on the basis of confessions extorted by excruciating methods of torture. Many of those trials ended with capital punishments. The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century brought changes to all processes of society, including legal science.
As well as by the Enlightenment ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, changes to trial procedures were also influenced by the work of Cesare Beccaria, Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher and politician. His treatise On Crimes and Punishments marks the beginning of modern criminal law. Advocating the principle of respect for the human rights of the accused, Beccaria in his treatises argues for public trials and opposes torture and the death penalty.
He believes that the criminal justice system should aim at the prevention of crime instead of punishment and that the improvement of living conditions would lead to decline in crime.
Prussia was the first country to abolish torture in , followed by Austria in and France in At the beginning of the 19th century, European legislation no longer used torture as a legal instrument in trial procedures.
Unfortunately, this was short lived. At the beginning of the 20th century, with national socialist and revolutionary ideas, human and civil rights were pushed out by the rights of nations and the revolution.
Secret civil and military police forces largely contributed to the use of torture, having tortured political dissidents, spies and prisoners of war.
International human rights and humanitarian organisations began to react to this systematic and unrestricted use of repression. In the inquisitorial procedure a judge or a group of judges actively investigate the case, in order to declare the verdict and decide on the potential penalty.
The accused could be convicted only if he acknowledged his guilt in the presence of two honourable witnesses. They denounced countries all around the world for the tremendous sufferings inflicted on civilians and the devastation caused by war and called upon them to return to the ethical principles of the Enlightenment period and to the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of These efforts resulted in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the un in , extremely important for the condemnation of torture.
A number of acts for the protection of human rights were adopted at the initiative of the Council of Europe; the most significant among them is the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, adopted in Rome in There have been a variety of human rights abuses permitted by the former Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir over his year rule. In particular, we have evidence of torture committed from after the Darfuri war under the premise of non-Arab ethnic cleansing.
More recently, protests in early calling for Omar al-Bashir to step down led to a new torrent of oppression with government forces detaining, torturing, and killing scores of civilians. Since then, al-Bashir relinquished power and the military council formed a transitional government with the main opposition coalition.
Where I lived in Sudan young boys like me would be forced into the army, they made you kill your own family. The boys in my village refused so the army took us. I was burnt, beaten, locked up on my own. I still have the scars. I was just crying for my mum every day. For years, there has been authoritarian rule in Ethiopia where torture has been a staple of the government. Attempts to claim a wide range of rights, including land rights or freedoms of expression or association etc.
When Daesh took the state, torture was used consistently on citizens as a means of oppression and control. Since Daesh lost its grip on the Mesopotamian state in , the Iraqi government has repeatedly used torture as an interrogation technique instead of carrying out proper criminal investigations. Our evidence shows that torture has been happening in Turkey for decades, mainly to repress the Kurdish minority and the political involvement of its people.
Based on 60 medico-legal reports we produced between February and March , our country briefing highlighted the systematic use of torture between to Read more about torture in Turkey. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, warring parties have continuously disregarded human rights and humanitarian law protections. Arbitrary detentions, kidnappings and torture have been widely reported on both side s.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights , over 14, people have been killed under the use of torture between and In Egypt, torture has been used routinely by successive regimes in response to any form of opposition including peaceful protests. In addition to people being tortured for their peaceful protest against the last three Egyptian governments, we also have evidence of people being tortured for their sexual orientation.
The government response to separatism in Cameroon has been heavy-handed. Though waves of abuse have come from both sides, Anglophone separatists have equally used force against civilians perceived to be associated with the government. Whilst oppositionists from Cameroon have been tortured for opposing the state, our evidence shows that many people - both men and women - are tortured on the grounds of their sexual orientation. Despite espousing the values of human rights, even the UK has been implicated in torture in recent years.
Although the ISC report was a good start, we still don't know the full extent of abuses and how politicians were involved. If the UK is to live up to the reputation it sets itself as a global leader post-Brexit, it needs to deliver accountability for its past crimes, and make clear that torture will never again be tolerated. Breadcrumb Home news.
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