tortures such as it must be a shock to anyone in the civilised world.”18 British intervention was then demanded in order to protect the Christian inhabitants of the Middle East.
The sense that the United Kingdom has a unique duty to save the rest of the world from torture continued into the late twentieth century. When the Labour government came to power in 1997, it soon announced what it said was going to be an “ethical foreign policy.” Looking for something on which to apply this, it latched onto the Optional Protocol for the UN Convention Against Torture, which would allow UN teams to inspect places of detention directly. The assumption was that this would bring little change domestically, but that British diplomats should be asked to lobby for other states to ratify the protocol. The Foreign Office also pumped large amounts of money into the Swiss-based Association for the Prevention of Torture, which had been central in the campaign for the new protocol. All this took place before the launch of the war on terror. Although the photographs from Abu Ghraib initially disturbed the sense that torture was something that only happened in places like Iraq and was perpetrated by people like those in the Ba’ath Party, there was still a strong feeling that this was an American problem and that British troops had a far more civilized way of behaving (see, for example, Bishop 2004; Raymont 2006). Subsequent events proved that this was largely wishful thinking.
Much of the worry about allegations of abuse during the beginning of the twenty-first century has been about the damage they might do to the reputation of the United Kingdom abroad, rather than about the suffering of the detainees. Prime Minister David Cameron called allegations of torture a “stain on Britain’s reputation” (Cobain 2010). Such sentiments are not confined to the United Kingdom. Senator John McCain told the US Senate, in response to allegations of American involvement in abuse, “This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies” (2005). As John Parry argues, debates about torture are often debates about identity (2010). Talking about torture can therefore be a proxy for talking about how one perceives his or her nation-state and its commitments.
The sense that torture is simply not something that the British (or Americans) do, can have pernicious implications. It is arguably, for example, behind the use of extraordinary renditions and the outsourcing of coercive interrogation to other regimes. British security officials may not have directly tortured Binyam Mohamed, but they seem to have been involved indirectly. Allowing someone to be sent to Morocco or Afghanistan is an attempt to maintain the claim of British innocence.
In writing about the often-contradictory relationship between self-perception, policy, and practice, the point is not to highlight obvious double standards. To do so would be to ignore the often genuine ways in which torture is abhorred and opposed by state and nonstate actors. Rather, the aim is to examine the ways in which a focus on torture can lead to blind spots and predilections. People acting in the name of the British state have been involved both in acts of cruelty and in acts of compassion, sometimes at the same time. Focusing on attempts to recognize torture allows us to explore how a “differentiated geography of harm and redress,” compassion, and indignation is formed in the political imagination of the British state, its officials, and its citizens (Das 2007, 333).
Structure of This Book
The roots of our contemporary notions of torture include three common origin stories. The first is to see the category of torture as an inevitable response to cruelty and suffering. The second is to understand a concern with torture as growing out of the increasing humanitarian sentiments born of the Enlightenment. The third is to argue that modern notions of torture have to be understood as a response to the horrors of World War II. However, in Chapter 1, I argue that torture did not gain its particular prominence as a harm above all others until the 1970s. It was at this point that Cold War politics, medical practice, refugee flows, and international human rights activists came together to lead to a focus on individual trauma and precise legal definition.
Torture involves distinct notions of victims and perpetrators, innocence and guilt. To count as a legally recognized survivor of torture, or to be found legally culpable as a perpetrator, one must pass a series of evidentiary and conceptual hurdles. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine how a focus on torture leads to the recognition of particular types of victims and survivors. The vast majority of claims for recognition as torture survivors in the United Kingdom involve immigration claims, and it is therefore on these that I focus. In Chapter 2, I examine the issues raised by attempts to recognize torture survivors in immigration claims. Using the example of one particular Iranian male, I argue that given the inherently problematic nature of much of the evidence presented, the recognition of torture survivors is an inevitably erratic process. In Chapter 3, I explore the dilemmas involved in the production of medicolegal reports about torture survivors. These reports are used by lawyers as evidence to corroborate a claim—made as part of an asylum application—that someone has been tortured. The clinicians writing these reports face the problem that torture is far from being a straightforward clinical category, and they are forced to read their clients’ minds and bodies for often highly ambiguous signs.
In immigration cases involving claims of torture, the key issue is not past incidents but events that have not yet taken place. The question asked by judges is not simply whether someone has been tortured in the past, but whether that person might be tortured in the future. In Chapter 4, therefore, I examine attempts to protect people from future acts of torture. I do so by exploring the efforts of the British government to deport a number of terror suspects to Algeria and the claims by their lawyers that they will be tortured on return to that country. I argue that the ways in which the courts attempt to speculate about the future leads to a focus on formal structures rather than on the often contingent and political causes of violence. An absolute prohibition is made much more ambiguous when it is projected into the future.
The other half of the definition of torture is the specific intent of the perpetrator. If torture is widely understood as a crime so horrific that it transcends boundaries, what type of person can be found guilty of torture? In Chapter 5, I explore the successful prosecution in 2005 of an Afghan “warlord,” the first person ever to be charged with torture in the United Kingdom. Given the events of the last ten years, as well as Britain’s record in its struggles against anticolonial insurgency, this seems a little surprising. The trial of the Afghan “warlord” is therefore compared to the largely unsuccessful prosecution of British soldiers for the abuse and beating to death of detainees after the invasion of Iraq. I argue that there is a structural prejudice, inherent in the law, to seeing torture as a crime committed by other people in other places.
Torture is understood as a uniquely international issue, subject to international conventions and monitored by international organizations. In Chapter 6, I shift focus again to examine the international human rights monitoring mechanisms that oversee the United Kingdom’s compliance with the human rights obligation to prohibit torture. In particular, I focus on the use of internationalized shame as a device to prevent torture. I argue that, as a result of the technical ways in which obligations are interpreted, the shame of torture is dispersed into arguments about procedure. By the end, there seems little to be ashamed of.
The internationally recognized legal prohibition of torture has brought many things with it. The focus on individual suffering has meant that the experience of victims cannot be totally forgotten, either politically or legally. The creation of international conventions means that there is a new language by which states can be held accountable for their actions. More precise definitions have created the possibility, still largely unfulfilled, of criminal prosecution for perpetrators. However, the political, legal, and ethical priority given to torture also raises its own questions. Torture
