international law torture mass incareation (1).docx

Val. UL Rev., 2008

Human Rights Quarterly, 2017

The use of torture in the War on Terror reinvigorated a longstanding debate about how to prevent such human rights violations, and whether they should be criminalized. Using US history as a case study, this article argues that the criminal sanction is likely to be more successful in preventing such abuses than many other often suggested methods. Analyzing thousands of pages of released government documents as an archive leads to the counterintuitive finding that torturers were often deterred, at least momentarily, by fear of criminal liability, and would have been successfully deterred if not for the lack of prior prosecutions.

Though inarguably condemned in practice, the practice of torture conducted by state entities remains a common narrative in the human rights discourse. Though commonplace worldwide, such practices have been immensely surfaced since the tragic events that took place 11 September 2001, with numerous states such as the US, deliberately normalizing torture as one of the essential means taken to gather counterterrorism-related intelligences. The resurface of enhanced interrogation techniques reflects ambiguities of how this has come to be, despite the conspicuous human rights regimes illegalizing such barbaric practices, and the familiarity of the US echo of civil rights protection globally. Thus such fundamental concerns above raises the question of how the US throughout the years, normalized torture practices under the deliberately constructed lawless age of ‘War on Terror.’ It argues of the purposive assembling of terrorism classification as essentially distinct compared to numerous types of combatants present historically and in the status quo, thus shaping the entitlement of an inhumane status, unbound nor limited from existing International laws. It further argues of the general weaknesses of existing human rights regimes in limiting state practices in the lawless age of terror, reflecting the human rights regime’s inability to exert power and reflecting the prevalence of torture-backed politic

Notre Dame journal of law, ethics & public policy

2014

This volume brings together the most important writing on torture and the "war on terrorism" by one of the leading US voices in the torture debate. Philosopher and legal ethicist David Luban reflects on this contentious topic in a powerful sequence of essays including two new and previously unpublished pieces. He analyzes the trade-offs between security and human rights, as well as the connection between torture, humiliation, and human dignity; the fallacy of using ticking-bomb scenarios in debates about torture; and the ethics of government lawyers. The book develops an illuminating and novel conception of torture as the use of pain and suffering to communicate absolute dominance over the victim. Factually stimulating and legally informed, this volume provides the clearest analysis to date of the torture debate. It brings the story up to date by discussing the Obama administration's failure to hold torturers accountable.

Criminal Justice Ethics

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Slovak Yearbook of International Law, 2022

Prohibition of torture as a right is part of the ius cogens system of international law. The prohibition as such is derived from the necessity of maintaining the physical and mental integrity of person, which is embedded in the humanity itself. Therefore, the prohibition of torture is not just an absolute and un-derogable, but also a fundamental and natural law, which has to be collectively guaranteed. Many regional human rights systems explicitly protect the values of this right. The Inter-American system for the protection of human rights is not an exception in this matter. The author follows theoretical perspectives of the prohibition of torture and later on analyzes some examples of the case-law, which deals with the issues related to acts of torture or other degrading or inhuman punishment.

Journal For the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2010

The present essay focuses on political torture during the twentieth century. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because it entails insights from history, politics, ideology, anthropology, psychology and literature. The aim of the present essay is to discuss the relation between "Classical" torture (in the past centuries) and "Modern" torture (in the twentieth century), analyzing the phenomena in a comparative perspective and paying attention to the hidden and unconscious motives behind historical facts. What I am interested in is the mechanism by which, in the twentieth century, torture has been reintroduced particularly for political prisoners-that means torture for ideas and conscience, torture as a technique of power and not merely as a technique of punishment. What torture destroys first is the dignity and privacy of the victim; only then does it destroy the victim's freedom and integrity. For this reason, every torture is an act of rape, even a symbolic one. I mean this in psychological terms, not as a demonstration of feminist vocabulary. Every touching of the victim's body is rape, emphasizing the "virility" of the torturer. First of all, the torturer wants to become a master of his victim's body, and only later, a master of the tortured person's mind. I include imagination in the concept of torture, imagination being one of the tools of the act of torturing. In torture, imagination becomes, in my demonstration, a never-ending weapon. Torturable v. non-torturable individuals. The twentieth-century breakthrough: brainwashing and electroshocks. The Armenian genocide. The Gulag and the Nazi camps. Experimental torture. Mao, the re-educator. The modern European machine. Fin-de-siecle horror: Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Africa: tribal torture and imported torture. South-American "Catholicism." Fidel, the exterminator.

Criminal Justice Matters, 2008