When was torture abolished

By contrast, preventing a detainee from sleeping by use of bright lights and loud noises might not be sufficiently severe to qualify as torture, but it would likely qualify as inhuman treatment. In both cases, torture can be physical or non-physical eg staging the execution of a family member. Note also that the inhuman or degrading treatment need not be intentional, i.

The Torture Convention prohibits both torture, on the one hand, and inhuman and degrading treatment, on the other. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits both torture and inhuman and degrading treatment equally, however.

Since Article 3 is directly enforceable in UK courts under section 6 Human Rights Act, it is likely that the exact distinction is less relevant in UK law. Notwithstanding the numerous tortures and horrendous acts of execution that were often performed in public as a form of warning to others, crime has remained a permanent part of human nature. But contemporary society should respond to this darker side of its nature only with humane solutions. International non-governmental organisations for protection of human rights, including Amnesty International, contributed with their work to the creation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the UN General Assembly in The procedure can be initiated only at the demand of the prosecutor, who is required to justify his accusation.

Presuming the guilt of the suspected person, the inquisitor starts to gather and to examine evidence only after he imprisons him or deprives him of his freedom. The procedure is one-sided — the tribunal issues the accusation and delivers the verdict, the inquisitor conducts the investigation in secrecy, while the accused cannot defend himself.

Such stringent criteria for minimum evidence showed to be difficult to implement in practice. For this reason, the practice of torture was introduced to the inquisitorial procedure, in addition to other legal norms of the Roman law, which gradually gained more and more authority in the medieval legal system. In , the Pope Innocent promulgated the bull Ad extirpanda, a very important document for the practice of judicial torture, which authorized, in defined circumstances, the use of torture to extort confessions from heretics.

Torture could be applied only in circumstances of a grave crime, if valid evidence was presented, if the confession of the accused was found to be truthful and in accordance with other evidence, and if the confession was repeated in neutral circumstances.

Torture of children and pregnant women was prohibited. If the accused endured the torture, he would still be convicted, on the ground of insufficient evidence, and subjected to the so-called extraordinary punishment, which was normally less severe than that to which he would have sentenced had he confessed to the crime. History of Torture. Go top. Shouldn't torture be permitted if its use will save lives?

Does the U. May the U. What are the remedies against torture? The Convention against Torture defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession….

It may be "inflicted by or at the instigation of or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. The prohibition against torture under international law applies to many measures—e. International law also prohibits mistreatment that does not meet the definition of torture, either because less severe physical or mental pain is inflicted, or because the necessary purpose of the ill-treatment is not present.

It affirms the right of every person not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Examples of such prohibited mistreatment include being forced to stand spread eagled against the wall; being subjected to bright lights or blindfolding; being subjected to continuous loud noise; being deprived of sleep, food or drink; being subjected to forced constant standing or crouching; or violent shaking.

In essence, any form of physical treatment used to intimidate, coerce or "break" a person during an interrogation constitutes prohibited ill-treatment. If these practices are intense enough, prolonged in duration, or combined with other measures that result in severe pain or suffering, they can qualify as torture.

The prohibition against torture as well as cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is not limited to acts causing physical pain or injury. It includes acts that cause mental suffering—e. Supreme Court has recognized, "coercion can be mental as well as physical…the blood of the accused is not the only hallmark of an unconstitutional inquisition" Miranda v. Arizona , U. State of Alabama , U.

As discussed below, the use of mind-altering drugs to compel a person to provide information would at least amount to inhuman or degrading treatment under the Convention against Torture.

Torture is universally condemned, and whatever its actual practice, no country publicly supports torture or opposes its eradication.

The prohibition against torture is well established under customary international law as jus cogens ; that is, it has the highest standing in customary law and is so fundamental as to supercede all other treaties and customary laws except laws that are also jus cogens.

Criminal acts that are jus cogens are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that any state can exercise its jurisdiction, regardless of where the crime took place, the nationality of the perpetrator or the nationality of the victim. Article 5 states: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The prohibition against torture is also fundamental to humanitarian law also known as the laws of war , which governs the conduct of parties during armed conflict.

An important element of international humanitarian law is the duty to protect the life, health and safety of civilians and other noncombatants, including soldiers who are captured or who have laid down their arms.

Torture of such protected persons is absolutely forbidden. Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, for example, bans "violence of life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" as well as "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. Committee against Torture, in the United States, the use of torture "is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority…No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture.

Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form…Every act of torture within the meaning of the [Convention against Torture] is illegal under existing federal and state law, and any individual who commits such an act is subject to penal sanctions as specified in criminal statutes. Although no single provision of the U. Constitution expressly prohibits torture as a means to extract information, secure a confession, punish for an act committed, intimidate or coerce, or for any reason based on discrimination, there is no question that torture violates rights established by the Bill of Rights.

In numerous cases, the U. Supreme Court has condemned the use of force amounting to torture or other forms of ill treatment during interrogations, including such practices as whipping, slapping, depriving a victim of food, water, or sleep, keeping him naked or in a small cell for prolonged periods, holding a gun to his head, or threatening him with mob violence. Torture would also violate state constitutions, whose provisions generally parallel the protections set forth in the federal Bill of Rights.

Article 4 of the Convention against Torture obligates state parties to ensure that all acts of torture are criminal offenses under domestic legislation. Although there is no single federal law specifically criminalizing torture, the United States has insisted that existing federal and state laws render illegal any act falling with the Convention against Torture's definition of torture.

In the United States, most criminal laws are state rather than federal. Although a few states have laws addressing torture as such, each state has laws that criminalize violence against persons e. In addition, states typically have specific laws that criminalize acts by public officials that constitute abuses of authority, "official oppression," or the unlawful infliction of bodily injury. The principal federal law that would apply to torture against detainees is 18 U. Q: Do non-citizens in the U.

Neither international nor domestic law conditions the right not to be subjected to torture on citizenship or nationality. No detainee held by U. All applicable international law applies to U. The prohibition against torture is universal and covers all countries both regarding U. Using force or the infliction of pain to overcome an individual's desire to maintain silent during interrogations not only violates the victim's right to be free from torture but also his or her right not to speak during an interrogation.

The Fifth Amendment of the U. Constitution also affirms the right against self-incrimination. This right has been interpreted to include the right to remain silent during custodial interrogations, regardless of whether the information sought would be incriminating.

There are only extremely limited exceptions to the right to remain silent. For example, the threat of imprisonment can be used to lawfully compel a witness to speak in grand jury proceedings provided the witness has been granted some form of immunity, i.

But these exceptions to the right against self-incrimination do not in any sense permit violations of the separate right to be free of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach.

That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken--of having integrity.

When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South. What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism.

You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood. The CIA's definition of "waterboarding"--recently leaked to ABC News--describes that process in plain English: "The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet.

Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

They said Al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two and a half minutes before begging to confess.

Before the Bush administration, two documented cases of the U. Armed Forces using "waterboarding" resulted in courts-martial for the soldiers implicated. In Donald Rumsfeld's post-September 11 Pentagon, the technique is approved and, we recently learned, has been used on at least eleven detainees, possibly many more.

What you see here is the deployment of a very basic and inescapable human reflex--the desire not to drown and suffocate--in order to destroy a person's autonomy. Even the most hardened fanatic can only endure two and a half minutes. After that, he is indeed "broken. The entire structure of Western freedom grew in part out of the searing experience of statesanctioned torture.

The use of torture in Europe's religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is still etched in our communal consciousness, as it should be. Then, governments deployed torture not only to uncover perceived threats to their faith-based autocracies, but also to "save" the victim's soul. Torturers understood that religious conversion was a difficult thing, because it necessitated a shift in the deepest recesses of the human soul.

The only way to reach those depths was to deploy physical terror in the hopes of completely destroying the heretic's autonomy.

They would, in other words, destroy a human being's soul in order to save it. That is what burning at the stake was--an indescribably agonizing act of torture that could be ended at a moment's notice if the victim recanted. In a state where theological doctrine always trumped individual liberty, this was a natural tactic.

Indeed, the very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person's soul and can do that much damage to a human being's person, then the state has extinguished all oxygen necessary for freedom to survive.

That is why, in George Orwell's totalitarian nightmare, the final ordeal is, of course, torture. Any polity that endorses torture has incorporated into its own DNA a totalitarian mutation. If the point of the U. Constitution is the preservation of liberty, the formal incorporation into U.

The founders understood this argument. Its preeminent proponent was George Washington himself. As historian David Hackett Fischer memorably recounts in his book, Washington's Crossing: "Always some dark spirits wished to visit the same cruelties on the British and Hessians that had been inflicted on American captives.

But Washington's example carried growing weight, more so than his written orders and prohibitions. He often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies. Even in the most urgent moments of the war, these men were concerned about ethical questions in the Revolution. Krauthammer has described Washington's convictions concerning torture as "pieties" that can be dispensed with today.

He doesn't argue that torture is not evil. Indeed, he denounces it in unequivocal moral terms: "[T]orture is a terrible and monstrous thing, as degrading and morally corrupting to those who practice it as any conceivable human activity including its moral twin, capital punishment.

This is a radical and daring idea: that we must extinguish human freedom in a few cases in order to maintain it for everyone else. It goes beyond even the Bush administration's own formal position, which states that the United States will not endorse torture but merely "coercive interrogation techniques. And it is based on a premise that deserves further examination: that our enemies actually deserve torture; that some human beings are so depraved that, in Krauthammer's words, they "are entitled to no humane treatment.

Let me state for the record that I am second to none in decrying, loathing, and desiring to defeat those who wish to replace freedom with religious tyranny of the most brutal kind--and who have murdered countless innocent civilians in cold blood.

Their acts are monstrous and barbaric. But I differ from Krauthammer by believing that monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder--just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing.