of the former against the will of the latter” (1973, 31). Torture here is organized rather than casual and includes the infliction of great suffering on the powerless by the powerful. Although not explicitly mentioned in this definition, the implicit assumption was that torture was carried out by the state, and all the examples documented refer to state torture. The possibility that torture might include domestic violence, for example, was simply not on the horizon.
Three features of this campaign warrant particular mention. The first is that Amnesty International did not simply work by lobbying politicians and officials but sought to mobilize grassroots public support through letter writing, petitions, and public meetings. Its arguments therefore took hold far away from the corridors of power. The second feature of the Campaign Against Torture is that the history of supporting individual prisoners of conscience meant that the experiences of individual torture survivors were given a prominent place. Perhaps deriving from the presence of broadly progressive and liberal Latin American exiles in Europe and North America, torture survivors were also seen as heroic and principled. The opening pages of the Amnesty International 1973 Report on Torture, for example, begin with first-person narratives detailing the suffering and pain experienced by torture survivors in Turkey, the Soviet Union, and Uruguay, in a style that is familiar from many Amnesty International documents. In this process, individual pain is highlighted as a cause of special horror.
From the early 1970s, medical groups were set up alongside most national Amnesty International sections. They were driven by a worry that doctors were participating in torture in many places around the world (Amnesty International 1977). Furthermore, and perhaps more important, was the need to provide evidence for allegations of torture (see Chapter 3; Amnesty International 1974). Later, attention would also turn to rehabilitation. Initially the focus was on the documentation of physical scars and other marks on bodies, as this was quickest and most practically feasible in contexts where doctors might only have a very short period of time to examine their patients. The Danish medical group, which in the early days was the largest and most influential, also focused on the neurological implications of torture, as many of its leading members were expert in this field. However, the language of psychological trauma also began to play a significant role, perhaps because of the increasing importance of the Latin American anti-torture movement, which was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis (Plotkin 2001). As such, the first publication by Amnesty International on the medical documentation of torture argued that “unquestionably the worst sequelae of torture were psychological and neurological” (1977, 12). In this work there was a profound sense that torture was unique in its levels of suffering, leading one Amnesty International publication to quote Jean Amery’s claim that “torture is the most terrible event remaining in man’s memory” (1973, 58). As such, torture was seen as leaving distinct wounds in the mind.
The third feature of the Amnesty International campaign was that, stemming from the success of the Greek case before the European Commission, the emphasis was on the norms of prohibition rather than on the political causes of torture. This was reflected in campaigns for declarations and conventions setting out the prohibition on torture at the United Nations. By the early 1970s, human rights had become caught up in Cold War politics, and many in the developing world and the Communist bloc were deeply suspicious of any criticism phrased in human rights terms. Indeed, many involved in the British and wider anti-torture movement saw the opposition to torture as a continuation of the opposition to Nazi Germany and totalitarian politics. However, the Campaign Against Torture had the benefit that some of its most important objects, such as Pinochet’s Chile, were US allies, and it was therefore able to drive straight through the middle of Cold War rivalries. The United States and its allies were not going to oppose a broad declaration prohibiting state violence. For the Soviet bloc the condemnation of torture provided a useful stick with which to beat Western-aligned governments in South America and Southern Europe. Furthermore, the prohibition of torture did not seem to be like other human rights, like the right to freedom of opinion, gender equality, or education, about which it was possible to have a debate on their relative merits. No state was going to say it was pro-torture. Instead, the debate was over what counted as torture.
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on 9 December 1975 condemning the use of torture. Amnesty International’s campaign was referred to many times during the debate over the resolution (Rodley 1987, 19). During the debate, several member states argued that if they were to lend their name to anything they would need to define what torture meant, otherwise it was far too vague (1987, 72). Therefore, although not legally binding, for the first time in any international instrument, the resolution provided a definition of torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating him or other persons. It does not include pain, or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions.”48 Crucially, unlike the UDHR, ICCPR, or ECHR, but drawing on the European Commission’s report on the Greek case in 1969, the resolution drew a distinction between “torture” and “cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment,” arguing that torture was a particularly “aggravated and deliberate form of the latter.”49 Torture is therefore given particular and specific prominence. The intention of public officials and the level of pain and suffering of the victims are seen as singling it out for particular approbation.
The United Kingdom Stands Accused Before the European Court of Human Rights
Following the outbreak of unrest in Northern Ireland and the introduction of internment in the early 1970s, the government of the Irish Republic was under domestic pressure to do something about British counterinsurgency tactics in Northern Ireland. Unable to intervene militarily, it tried to place diplomatic pressure on the United Kingdom by protesting to the European Commission of Human Rights in late 1971.50 Referring to the report from Amnesty International as well as to the Compton Report, the Irish government alleged that internment without trial was discriminatory and violated the right to liberty and security of the person. Although the Irish government did not make specific allegations of torture, it alleged a broader breach of the prohibition of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 of the ECHR.51
It took until mid-January 1978 for the European Court of Human Rights to come to a decision on the case. The British government did not contest the claim of a breach of Article 3 or the existence of the five techniques. However, one key issue in the case became how to characterize the techniques of sensory deprivation, such as hooding, and the use of white noise, the effects of which seemed primarily to be psychological. Although sensory deprivation was certainly not new, the incidents that had received most public attention through the late 1960s and early 1970s in Greece and Latin America had involved much more physical forms of violence.52 In an earlier advisory opinion, the European Commission of Human Rights had argued that Republican detainees had “described feelings of anxiety and fear as well as disorientation and isolation during the time they were subjected to the techniques and after.”53 However, they also noted that psychiatrists were unable to agree as to the long-term impact of the use of such methods. Some doctors argued that the aftereffects could last for a considerable time. Others, in contrast, claimed that the “psychiatric symptoms developed … during interrogation had been minor and that their persistence was a result of everyday life in Northern Ireland.”54 The commission surmised that although it was unable to establish the exact degree of psychiatric aftereffects, the possibility of those aftereffects could not be excluded. The commission’s conclusion was that “the systematic application of the techniques for the purposes of inducing a person to give information shows a clear resemblance to those methods of systematic torture which have been known over the ages.”55 Although the commission found that the psychological implications of the techniques could not be predicted with any accuracy, it argued that the mere possibility of severe psychological effects was enough to prohibit the use of those techniques.
The
