Today is the 20th Anniversary of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture: Will the Torture and the Impunity Ever Stop?

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June 26 is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, and today marks its 20th anniversary. When it first took place in 1998, the date was chosen because it is a particularly significant day in the field of human rights. Eleven years previously, on June 26, 1987, the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the UN Convention Against Torture), an enormous breakthrough in the global moral struggle against the use of torture, came into effect, and June 26 also marks the date in 1945 when the UN Charter, the founding document of the United Nations, was signed by 50 of the 51 original member countries (Poland signed it two months later).

The establishment of the UN and of key pledges regarding human rights has been a high point for the aspiration for a better world, which, of course, came about as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. After the UN was founded, the next major milestone in this quest was the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, and in 1950, in a similar vein, the newly formed Council of Europe established the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (originally known as the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms), which entered into force on September 3, 1953.

Unfortunately, although aspirations for a better world are profoundly worthwhile, they constantly jostle with the political realities of a world in which the thirst for power, paranoia, nationalism and capitalism seek to undermine them. Nevertheless, they constantly provide a benchmark for higher human ideals, and it is always reassuring when human rights are prominently observed.

Since the creation of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, however, there has been little opportunity to reflect on the success of the torture convention’s moral beacon. Just three years after it was declared by the UN, the US was attacked, on September 11, 2001, and responded by establishing a global program of torture and rendition, which, given America’s prominence on the world stage, has severely damaged the scope of human rights aspirations ever since.

The US has also, conspicuously, failed to hold any senior official to account for their role in implementing a torture program after 9/11. It is true that there has been some degree of commendable transparency — through the release, in December 2014, of the redacted 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s extraordinary 6,000-page report about the CIA’s torture program, which found it to be horribly brutal and not actually effective, but it has not led to any prosecutions.

Last summer, there was some measure of success when the two architects of the CIA’s torture program, former military psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, settled out of court, for an undisclosed sum, with some of the victims of the CIA’s torture program (and the family of another man who died as a result of his torture by his US captors), but in the meantime, under Trump, a known torturer, Gina Haspel, who briefly ran the CIA’s first post-9/11 torture site in Thailand, in 2002, has been made the director of the CIA.

Guantánamo

And at Guantánamo, meanwhile, the handful of men allegedly responsible for 9/11 and other attacks are stuck in a seemingly never-ending Groundhog Day of pre-trial hearings in the military commission trial system, a broken imitation of justice that cannot overcome the fact that those facing prosecution were tortured by the US, and torturing people (and then, to rub salt into their wounds, wanting them to keep quiet about it) is incompatible with justice. 

Moreover, as I recently marked 6,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence, via the Close Guantánamo campaign I established in 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner, it is also as relevant as it always has been that holding people for such a long time without charge or trial (6,000 days is 16 years and five months), and without them having any indication of when, if ever, they might be released, is also a form of torture. Rather disturbingly, I think, back in October 2003, Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross voiced his concerns about the effects of open-ended imprisonment without charge or trial in an interview with the New York Times.

Girod said, during a Guantánamo visit, ”One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely,” adding, ’’The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

As the Times explained, “In 18 months, 21 detainees have made 32 suicide attempts, and human rights groups have said the high incidence of such events, as well as the number of detainees being treated for clinical depression, was a direct result of the uncertainties of their situations. Mr. Girod said that in meetings with members of his inspection teams, detainees regularly asked about what was going to happen to them. ‘’It’s always the No. 1 question,’ he said. ‘They don’t know about the future.’”

Nearly 15 years later, I cannot imagine how some of the men still held are managing to cope with their extraordinarily long imprisonment without charge or trial, and I fear that some of them have found themselves unable to cope. 

As we also recoil from Donald Trump’s treatment of children, separated from their parents at the Mexican border, and now held in open-ended detention, it’s worth reflecting that this kind of treatment is only possible because, behind everything, Guantánamo still lurks, normalizing open-ended imprisonment, and largely ignored or forgotten — or even supported — by the American people.

In the UK, too, the impact of torture continues to be felt. Recently, the government was finally obliged to apologize unreservedly to Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, Libyans who were kidnapped and rendered to torture in Libya by the CIA after a tip-off from Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, in 2004, but just last week six rights groups wrote to Theresa May warning her not to allow the US to redact two reports — ‘Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition: 2001-2010,’ and ‘Detainee Mistreatment and Rendition: Current Issues’ — prepared over the last five years by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a group of MPs and peers that provides oversight of the UK’s intelligence agencies, which are expected to be published imminently. In addition, an all-party group of MPs and peers led by the former home secretary Ken Clarke have also written to Theresa May “demanding a judge-led inquiry into the Belhaj case and others in which the UK became involved in the rendition and torture of detainees”, as the Guardian described it.

Moreover, open-ended detention is not only a US problem, as the UK’s immigration detention system shows. As the Freedom from Torture website explains, “Every year, the UK Government detains around 30,000 people for immigration purposes,” and it is “the only European country to have no time limit on immigration detention.”

Worldwide, unfortunately, torture is not going away despite the best efforts of those who aspire to create a better world. On its dedicated page on torture, for example, Amnesty International notes that, over the last five years, it “has reported on torture in 141 countries — three-quarters of the world.”

Below is a joint statement — a call for action — to mark the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, issued by the UN Committee against Torture, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, along with the Committee on the Prevention of Torture in Africa, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

“70 years on, torture is still widespread: more action needed to achieve a torture-free world for all”

Seven decades ago, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first international text prohibiting torture in absolute terms. Its fifth article, approved by unanimous support, unequivocally stipulates, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Since then, with the mobilization of the human rights movement, the international community has made remarkable progress towards the eradication of torture. The ban on torture and other ill treatment has been incorporated into an extensive network of international and regional human rights treaties. The prohibition of torture has since been elevated to jus cogens, thus recognizing that it is so fundamental that it supersedes all treaties and customary laws.

The United Nations Convention against Torture, adopted by the General Assembly in 1984 and ratified to date by 163 States, is the most comprehensive instrument in international law to prohibit torture under any circumstances. The principles it contains remain highly relevant today: torture is a crime. It is never allowed nor justified, not even during an emergency, political instability, threat of war or even a state of war. States have an obligation to take effective measures to prevent acts of torture in any territories under their jurisdiction. Those who commit acts of torture should be prosecuted anywhere. In addition, victims of torture have a right to rehabilitation and redress.

Over the past 70 years, the use of torture has been criminalised in a myriad of national legislations and accountability for the acts of torture has been incorporated in many penal codes. We have come a long way to accept the universality of jurisdiction over acts of torture irrespective of where or by whom they were committed. We have seen an expansion of the definition of torture through jurisprudence, increasing the threshold of protection under national and international law. In order to prevent torture and other ill-treatment, a system of regular visits by independent international and national mechanisms to places where people are deprived of their liberty has been established. Preventive mechanisms have also been established at the regional level.

However, the promise has not been kept for all. Torture continues and the existence of so many surviving victims of torture, many of whom are unacknowledged and unsupported, is a dramatic testimony to the persistence of torture worldwide. Impunity remains high; so- called evidence obtained under torture is in many countries still admitted in court; increasingly, torture practices are being acquiesced to under ‘certain circumstances’, especially in the context of the fight against terrorism; and far too many human rights defenders face daily life threats and reprisals for fighting impunity and for their noble work in support of victims.

Today, on the occasion of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, all anti-torture mechanisms of the United Nations and regional mechanisms from Africa, Europe and the Americas stand together to reiterate that torture can never be justified, not even as a measure of last resort. They call with one voice for all acts of torture to be effectively prosecuted and for more action to be taken to prevent such acts from occurring again.

Today, the undersigned stand in solidarity with the thousands of victims of torture and their families, recalling that victims have under international law an enforceable right to effective remedy, including redress and rehabilitation.

While we commemorate the unequivocal promise for collective prosperity enshrined 70 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the undersigned call on all States to renew efforts to make that promise a reality: a torture-free world for all.

The United Nations Committee against Torture
The United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture
The United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture
jointly with
The Committee on the Prevention of Torture in Africa
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.

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