Showing papers on "Torture published in 2014"

Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

Abstract: According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.

Respect for Human Rights Has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

Abstract: According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the US State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this paper, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.

Law of the European Convention on Human Rights

Abstract: "The European Convention on Human Rights in Context. Article 2: The Right to Life. Article 3: Freedom from Torture or Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Article 4: Freedom from Slavery, Servitude or Forced or Compulsory Labour. Article 5: The Right to Liberty and Security of the Person. Article 6: The Right to a Fair Trial. Article 7: Freedom from Retroactive Criminal Offences and Punishment. Articles 8-11: General Considerations. Article 8: The Right to Respect for Private and Family Life, Home and Correspondence. Article 9: Freedom of Religion. Article 10: Freedom of Expression. Article 11: Freedom of Assembly and Association. Article 12: The Right to Marry and to Found a Family. Article 13: The Right to an Effective National Remedy. Article 14: Freedom from Discrimination in Respect of Protected Rights. Article 15: Derogation in Time of War or Other Public Emergency. Articles 16-18: Other Restrictions upon the Rights Protected. Article 1: First Protocol: The Right to Property. Article 2: First Protocol: The Right to Education. Article 3: First Protocol: The Right to Free Elections. Rights Protected by the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Protocols to the Convention. The European Commission on Human Rights: Practice and Procedure. Admissibility of Applications. The Operation of the European Court of Human Rights. The Role of the Committee of Ministers. Reforming the Convention: Eleventh Protocol."

Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

Abstract: The point 1. Why are people violent? 2. Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships 3. Defense, punishment, and vengeance 4. The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority 5. Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity 6. Honor and shame 7. War 8. Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods 9. On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed? 10. The prevailing wisdom 11. Intimate partner violence 12. Rape 13. Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration 14. Torture 15. Homicide: he had it coming 16. Ethnic violence and genocide 17. Self-harm and suicide 18. Violent bereavement 19. Non-bodily violence: robbery 20. The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model 21. Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather than using some other medium? 22. Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence 23. How do we end violence? 24. Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research implications The denouement.

Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s

Abstract: The American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma, as Barbara Keys shows in this provocative history. "Reclaiming American Virtue" situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America's moral leadership.Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate a Cold War narrative that pitted a virtuous United States against the evils of communism. Liberals sought moral cleansing by dissociating the United States from foreign malefactors, spotlighting abuses such as torture in Chile, South Korea, and other right-wing allies. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions.Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America's recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. It would be a small step from world's judge to world's policeman, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Abstract: French edition: 24 e rapport général du Comité européen pour la prévention de la torture et des peines ou traitements inhumains ou dégradants (CPT) The opinions expressed in this work are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily refect the ofcial policy of the Council of Europe.

Divergent Incentives for Dictators: Domestic Institutions and (International Promises Not to) Torture

Abstract: Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institution—a political opposition party—may provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while another—an effective domestic judiciary—may constrain the dictator’s ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this ar...

The prevalence of torture and associated symptoms in United States Iraqi refugees.

Abstract: Iraqi refugees face difficulties resettling in the US, which may be partially due to high rates of torture. This study determines the rates of torture experience, primary and secondary, among Iraqi refugees in the US; and the association to physical and mental health symptoms on arrival. A retrospective review was conducted in 2011 on the post-arrival health screens of Iraqi refugees resettled in Utah in 2008 and 2009. Measures included reports of torture experience as defined by the United Nations; reports of physical and mental health symptoms at the time of screening; and association of torture to the presence of symptoms on arrival. The study included the health screens of 497 (97 %) of eligible Iraqi refugees. Most experienced torture (56 %) before arrival in the US Logistic regression revealed that torture was the most significant predictor of mental illness symptoms. Iraqi refugees in the US have a high prevalence of torture, and torture is associated with the presence of both mental and physical symptoms on the post-arrival health screen. This information is critical to the development of successful resettlement strategies for Iraqi refugees.

Female Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract: This article explores and analyzes the role of women who exercised agency as perpetrators during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Genocide narratives traditionally cast women as victims, and many women did suffer horrific abuses and become victims of torture in Rwanda. However, this gender-based characterization of women is inaccurate and incomplete. After presenting a multidisciplinary body of literature relevant to female agency during genocide, this article explores three core questions related to female agency during the Rwandan genocide. It discusses how women were mobilized before and during the genocide, the specific actions of women who exercised agency and finally what happened to these women in the aftermath of the genocide. This article is based upon research that was gathered by the author and includes interviews of female perpetrators as well as victims and witnesses of direct violence committed by women. The article asserts that women played an active role in the Rwandan genocide but ...

The Istanbul protocol (manual on the effective investigation and documentation of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment): implementation and education in Israel.

Abstract: All victims of violence encountered in our emergency rooms and clinics need to be recognized and documented as such. Although there has been progress in the implementation of rules concerning (domestic) violence against women, children and the elderly, the management of cases where patients have been subjected to violence while under the custody of legal enforcement agencies, or patients who have been victims of torture, is still not sufficiently standardized. We describe the Istanbul Protocol of the United Nations, an excellent tool that can help physicians and health professionals recognize and treat cases of torture or institutional violence.

Human Rights as a Security Threat: Lawfare and the Campaign against Human Rights NGOs

Abstract: In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism—such as torture and extrajudicial executions—that constitute war crimes and can be presented in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Israel as a case study, I investigate the local and global dimensions of the securitization processes, focusing on how different securitizing actors—academics, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, policy makers, and legislators—mobilize the media, shape public opinion, lobby legislators and policy makers, introduce new laws, and pressure donors to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention to limit the scope of human rights work. Following the dawn of the new millennium, neoconservative forces within liberal democracies have been at the forefront of a campaign against what they call the “politicization of human rights.” This relatively new campaign is intricately linked to the war on terrorism and is part of a backlash against the mounting success of liberal human rights organizations and cause lawyers in subjecting warfare to legal analysis and oversight. The objective of the campaign is to undermine human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been providing evidence in criminal suits brought against military and government officials in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. In this article, I examine how the term lawfare, which combines the words law and warfare and is defined as the use of law for

Beyond the erotics of Orientalism: Lawfare, torture and the racial–sexual grammars of legitimate suffering:

Abstract: Contrary to commonsense understandings of torture as a form of information-gathering, confessions elicited through the use of torture produce notoriously unreliable data, and most interrogation exp...

A New International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice

Abstract: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECCJ) is an increasingly active and bold international adjudicator of human rights violations in West Africa. Since acquiring jurisdiction over human rights issues in 2005, the ECCJ has issued several path-breaking judgments, including against the Gambia for the torture of journalists, against Niger for condoning modern forms of slavery, and against Nigeria for failing to regulate the multinational oil companies that polluted the Niger Delta. This article explains why ECOWAS member states authorized the ECCJ to review human rights suits by individuals but did not allow private actors to complain about violations of regional economic rules. In addition to explaining the ECCJ’s striking transformation, the article makes several other contributions. It illustrates how an existing international institution can be redeployed for new purposes; it highlights the contributions of civil society, supranational officials, and ECOWAS judges to expanding the Court’s mandate; it analyzes the ECCJ’s distinctive jurisdiction and access rules; and it shows how the ECCJ has survived challenges to its authority. Our analysis is based on original field research in Nigeria, including more than two-dozen interviews with judges, government officials, attorneys, and NGOs. We also draw upon the first-ever coding of all ECCJ decisions through 2010. The ECCJ’s transformation is also theoretically significant. The article’s final section and conclusion reassesses theories of regional integration, institutional change, and transnational legal mobilization in light of the ECCJ’s experience to demonstrate the implications of our findings for international institutions beyond West Africa.

Dowry in 21st-Century India: The Sociocultural Face of Exploitation

Abstract: The World Health Organization (2009) implicates deep-rooted cultural and social norms as influential contributing factors toward physical and intimate partner violence against women. The dowry system is a social practice that perpetuates the oppression, torture, and murder of women in India. The practice of dowry is an expected part of marriage in cultures where arranged marriages are the norm. Violence can occur when the dowry or bride-price is deemed unsatisfactory by the recipient. In India, in spite of laws prohibiting the practice, not much has changed over the last 30 years. The National Crime Records Bureau of India, recorded a total of 8,618 female deaths related to dowry disputes in 2011, and the Asian Women’s Human Rights Council (2009) estimates that the practice of dowry is implicated in 25,000 deaths and maiming of women between the ages of 15–34 in India every year. The current review of literature reveals that despite efforts on the part of the Indian government, social activists and femini...

Human rights : an introduction

Abstract: Introduction 1. Theorizing Human Rights 2. Regulating Human Rights 3. Censorship 4. Political Prisoners 5. Torture 6. The Death Penalty 7. Apartheid 8. Slavery 9. Genocide 10. Refugees Conclusion

Martial Law? Military Experience, International Law, and Support for Torture

Abstract: A large body of work points to diverging civil–military views on the initial decision to use force, yet there is little sense if similar differences hold over appropriate conduct in the midst of armed conflict The rise of international laws governing behavior during war has similarly raised the question of whether these rules can shape the beliefs of various domestic actors This paper seeks to address both gaps in the literature by leveraging the use of experiments embedded in a pair of US national surveys to examine the impact of international law and military experience on individual attitudes toward torture The results show veterans are significantly more likely to support torture compared to civilians without any prior military background International law further reduces civilian support for torture, while veterans are largely unaffected by general legal appeals However, when facing highly precise rules, or where the threat of punishment is delegated to third parties, more legalized agreements can significantly reduce veteran support for torture The results have implications for the study of institutional design, the differential effects of legal norms on nonstate actors, and the potential for greater awareness of the laws of war to influence attitudes toward wartime violence

Feminist perspectives on contemporary international law : between resistance and compliance?

Abstract: 1. Introduction Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson PART ONE: FEMINIST THEORY AND METHOD IN INTERNATIONAL LAW Navigating Feminisms: At the Margins, in the Mainstreams or Elsewhere? Reflections on Charlesworth, Otomo and Pearson Vanessa Munro 2. Talking to Ourselves? Feminist Scholarship in International Law Hilary Charlesworth 3. Searching for Virtue in International Law Yoriko Otomo 4. Feminist Project(s): The Spaces of International Law Zoe Pearson PART TWO: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Three Feminist Critiques of Varying Feminist Capitulations to Crisis-Hegemony. Reflections on Otto, Mertus and Grahn-Farley Anna Grear 5. Remapping Crisis through a Feminist Lens Dianne Otto 6. Road Blocks, Blind Spots, Speed Bumps: A Feminist Look at the Post-9/11 Landscape for NGOs Julie Mertus 7. The Politics of Inevitability: An Examination of Janet Halley's Critique of the Criminalisation of Rape as Torture Maria Grahn-Farley PART THREE: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL AND LOCAL JUSTICE From the Margins to the Mainstream and Back Again: Problems and Paradoxes of Feminist Engagement in Global and Local Justice. Reflections on Nesiah, Kouvo, Andersson, and Thomas Alice Edwards 8. Missionary Zeal for a Secular Mission: Bringing Gender to Transitional Justice and Redemption to Feminism Vasuki Nesiah 9. Taking Women Seriously? Conflict, State-building and Gender in Afghanistan Sari Kouvo 10. Trafficking in Human Beings: Vulnerability, Criminal Law and Human Rights Ulrika Andersson 11. Women Workers Take Over Power at the Margins: Economic Resistance, Political Compliance Dania Thomas 12. Concluding (or Beginning?) Thoughts: Postcards to the Future Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson

Human Rights-Based Approaches to Clinical Social Work

Abstract: Rights-based vs. Conventional Needs-based Approaches to Clinical Social Work.- Rights-based Approach to Working with Torture Survivors.- Rights-based Clinical Practice with Survivors of Human Trafficking.- Intimate Partner Violence and a Rights-based Approach to Healing.- The Use of Self in Engaging in Rights-based Clinical Practice.

The kindest cut? Surgical castration, sex offenders and coercive offers

Abstract: The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) have conducted visits and written reports criticising the surgical castration of sex offenders in the Czech Republic and Germany. They claim that surgical castration is degrading treatment and have called for an immediate end to this practice. The Czech and German governments have published rebuttals of these criticisms. The rebuttals cite evidence about clinical effectiveness and point out this is an intervention that must be requested by the sex offender and cannot occur without informed consent. This article considers a number of relevant arguments that are not discussed in these reports but which are central to how we might assess this practice. First, the article discusses the possible ways in which sex offenders could be coerced into castration and whether this is a decisive moral problem. Then, it considers a number of issues relevant to determining whether sex offenders are harmed by physical castration. The article concludes by arguing that sex offenders should not be coerced into castration, be that via threats or offers, but that there is no reason to think that this is occurring in the Czech Republic or Germany. In some cases, castration might be useful for reconfiguring a life that has gone badly awry and where there is no coercion, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment are mistaken about this being degrading treatment.

Ethics and Global Security : A cosmopolitan approach

Abstract: This book will be the first systematic examination of the role that ethics plays in international security in both theory and practice, and offers the reader a concrete ethics for global security. Questions of morality and ethics have long been central to global security, from the death camps, world wars and H-bombs of the 20th century, to the humanitarian missions, tsunamis, terrorism and refugees of the 21st. This book goes beyond the Just War tradition to demonstrate how ethical commitments influence security theory, policy and international law, across a range of pressing global challenges. The book highlights how, from patrolling a territorial border to maintaining armed forces, security practices have important ethical implications, by excluding some from consideration, presenting others as potential threats and exposing them to harm, and licensing particular actions. While many scholars and practitioners of security claim little interest in ethics, ethics clearly has an interest in them. This innovative book extends the traditional agenda of war and peace to consider the ethics of force short of war such as sanctions, deterrence, terrorism, targeted killing, and torture, and the ethical implications of new security concerns such as identity, gender, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, and the global ecology. It advances a concrete ethics for an era of global threats, and makes a case for a cosmopolitan approach to the theory and practice of security that could inspire a more just, stable and inclusive global order. This book fills an important gap in the literature and will be of much interest to students of ethics, security studies and international relations.

Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity

Abstract: Challenges western images of Ottoman prisons as sites of Oriental brutality. Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual behaviour traditionally associated with Ottoman (or 'Turkish') prisons, Kent Schull argues that they were a site of immense reform and contestation during the late 19th and early 20th century. He shows that they acted as 'laboratories of modernity' for the Ottoman ruling establishment during the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918), playing a critical role in attempts to transform the empire comprehensively. It was within the walls of these prisons that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out, such as administrative reform and centralization, the rationalization of Islamic criminal law and punishment, issues of gender and childhood, rehabilitating prisoners, bureaucratic professionalisation, Ottoman national identity, and social engineering. Key Features: *Views the prison as a microcosm of imperial transformation during this critical period in Middle East history *Heavily critiques Michel Foucault's approach to punishment, state power, and society by applying it to a non-Western context *Challenges assumptions about the impact the Second Constitutional Period had on the development of the current Middle East nation-state system and society.

Torture, Power, and Law

Abstract: This volume brings together the most important writing on torture and the 'war on terror 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.

How Norms Die: Torture and Assassination in American Security Policy

Abstract: A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other evaluation. There is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the “global war on terror.” My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressing all norms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers.

The Penal System

Abstract: This chapter takes a look at the types of punishment that existed during Joseon period, ranging from corporal punishment to exile, and also the rationality behind their application. Penal servitude was for criminals who committed relatively serious crime; it involved putting the captured person in a large building and making him do hard labor, similar to imprisonment today. The use of torture and corporal punishment differed according to social class. The penal system did not undergo fundamental change until the late Joseon period. Many changes occurred in the eighteenth century during the reigns of Yeongjo and Jeongjo when abuses in the system became a political and social issue. The government also increased its supervision over the penal system. In the late Joseon period, criminals did not take a direct path to their exile location but went on a winding route in order to conform to the distance stipulated by law. Keywords: corporal punishment; Jeongjo; Joseon period; penal servitude; penal system; Yeongjo

Living in Fear: Better outcomes for people with learning disabilities and autism.

Abstract: In the UK, almost all people with learning disabilities and autism live either in the family home or with support in their own home or a community based residential service. How much contact people have with their community and the support they have to access their community safely often depends on where they live and their level of ability (Emerson and Hatton, 20081). As people have become more visible and active in their local communities, the issue of personal safety has increased in relevance and importance. The media, official sources such as public enquiries and a small number of recent research studies have all highlighted disabled people’s experiences of victimisation in the community and in particular the problem of disability hate crime. The issue is one of human rights – under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability, article 19(2006) states that people with disabilities have a right to a life in the community – not just a house. The European Convention on Human Rights states that all people have a right to freedom from persecution and torture and a right to liberty and security. The UK Disability Discrimination Act (2005) clearly sets out the expectation that people with disabilities should be included and not discriminated against in terms of access to services and facilities, employment, education to name just a few. The Mental Capacity Act (2005) clearly sets out that people with intellectual disabilities should be assumed to have capacity for each individual decision they have to make unless strong evidence suggests otherwise.

Torture allegations as events data Introducing the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) specific allegation data

Abstract: Forthcoming in Journal of Peace Research, 2014 The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government illtreatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI’s naming and shaming behavior, but also states’ (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.

War and Torture as “Just Deserts”

Abstract: Ordinary citizens sometimes favor making foreign actors �pay� for their crimes at punishment levels that exceed the dictates of national security. In an online survey of adult U.S. citizens, individual differences in the general approval of retributive justice predict support for military responses to international crimes, but only when the casualties are mentioned. Retributivists also are more supportive of torturing captured terrorists. These relationships control for partisanship, ideology, humanitarianism, and hawkish foreign-policy beliefs, and occur only among citizens with low and medium levels of political sophistication. Sophistication increased citizens� reliance on instrumental hawk/dove beliefs, and�in the case of torture�their reliance on political ideology, thus attenuating the temptation to support policies aimed at retribution. These findings suggest that less sophisticated citizens� gut-level desires for retribution heighten their support for the torture of terrorist detainees and for the use of military action to retaliate for vividly described international offenses.

The (in)effectiveness of torture for combating insurgency

Abstract: It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting tortu...