Torture

About: Torture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8173 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109895 citations.

Doctors and torture.

Abstract: Dr. Robert Jay Lifton writes that there is evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

Foucault live : (interviews, 1966-84)

Abstract: Madness only exists in society -- Andre Breton : a literature of knowledge -- The order of things -- The discourse of history -- History, discourse and discontinuity -- Foucault responds to Sartre -- The archeology of knowledge -- The birth of a world -- Rituals of exclusion -- Intellectuals and power -- Confining societies -- An historian of culture -- Equipments of power -- On Attica -- Film and popular memory -- Talk show -- From torture to cellblock -- On literature -- Schizo-culture : infantile sexuality -- Schizo-culture : on prison and psychiatry -- Paul's story -- Sade : sargeant of sex -- The politics of Soviet crime -- The social extension of the norm -- Sorcery and madness -- I, Pierre Riviere -- Power affects the body -- The end of the monarchy of sex -- The eye of power -- The anxiety of judging -- Clarifications on the question of power -- The danger of child sexuality -- The impossible prison -- White magic and black gown -- "Paris-Berlin" -- The simplest of pleasures -- Truth is in the future -- The masked philosopher -- Friendship as a way of life -- Passion according to Werner Schroeter -- Sexual choice, sexual act -- Space, knowledge and power -- How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth? -- History and homosexuality -- An ethics of pleasure -- Sex, power and the politics of identity -- The cultural insularity of contemporary music -- Archeology of a passion -- What our present is -- Problematics -- What calls for punishment? -- The ethics of the concern for self -- An aesthetics of existence -- The concern for truth -- The return of morality.

On crimes and punishments and other writings

Abstract: Published in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) courted both success and controversy in Europe and North America. Enlightenment luminaries and enlightened monarchs alike lauded the text and looked to it for ideas that might help guide the various reform projects of the day. The equality of every citizen before the law, the right to a fair trial, the abolition of the death penalty, the elimination of the use of torture in criminal interrogations-these are but a few of the vital arguments articulated by Beccaria. This volume offers a new English translation of On Crimes and Punishment alongside writings by a number of Beccaria's contemporaries. Of particular interest is Voltaire's commentary on the text, which is included in its entirety. The supplementary materials testify not only to the power and significance of Beccaria's ideas, but to the controversial reception of his book. At the same time that philosophes proclaimed that it contained principles of enduring importance to any society grappling with matters of political and criminal justice, allies of the ancien regime roundly denounced it, fearing that the book's attack on feudal privileges and its call to separate law from religion (and thus crime from sin) would undermine their longstanding privileges and powers. Long appreciated as a foundational text in criminology, Beccaria's arguments have become central in debates over capital punishment. This new edition presents Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments as an important and influential work of Enlightenment political theory.

Women, War, and Rape: Challenges Facing The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract: This article analyzes the challenges facing the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1991 (the Tribunal) as it investigates "savage rape on a horrifying scale ... as torture mutilation femicide and genocide ... as a military strategy." After an introductory section the article examines the occurrence of rape in war as it has generally been characterized in legal discourse as it has occurred in the former Yugoslavia and as it occurred in other armed conflicts. This section also looks at the relationship among militarism misogyny and rape. The third section considers the confusion existing about the characterization of war rape under international humanitarian law (IHL) and argues that IHL is gender-biased because it views rape only as a challenge to honor. This analysis is explained in sub-sections that discuss rape as a crime against honor and dignity as a crime against humanity and as a crime against gender. Section 4 reviews the various prospects for prosecuting rape before the Tribunal that are offered by the framework created by the subject matter jurisdiction of the Tribunal and by its rules of procedure and evidence. The final section concludes that war is a "male habit" that victimizes tragic numbers of women and that the Tribunal must overcome the legacy of a legal system that overlooks womens pain and a war system that uses rape as a weapon.

Protecting the endangered human: toward an international treaty prohibiting cloning and inheritable alterations.

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTION We humans tend to worry first about our own happiness, then about our families, then about our communities. In times of great stress, such as war or natural disaster, we may focus temporarily on our country but we rarely think about Earth as a whole or the human species as a whole. This narrow perspective, perhaps best exemplified by the American consumer, has led to the environmental degradation of our planet, a grossly widening gap in living standards between rich and poor people and nations and a scientific research agenda that focuses almost exclusively on the needs and desires of the wealthy few. Reversing the worldwide trends toward market-based atomization and increasing indifference to the suffering of others will require a human rights focus, forged by the development of what Vaclav Havel has termed a "species consciousness."1 In this Article we discuss human cloning and inheritable genetic alterations from the human species perspective, and suggest language for a proposed international "Convention of the Preservation of the Human Species" that would outlaw all efforts to initiate a pregnancy by using either intentionally modified genetic material or human replication cloning, such as through somatic cell nuclear transfer. We summarize international legal action in these areas over the past five years, relate these actions to arguments for and against a treaty and conclude with an action plan. B. HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE HUMAN SPECIES The development of the atomic bomb not only presented to the world for the first time the prospect of total annihilation, but also, paradoxically, led to a renewed emphasis on the "nuclear family," complete with its personal bomb shelter. The conclusion of World War II (with the dropping of the only two atomic bombs ever used in war) led to the recognition that world wars were now suicidal to the entire species and to the formation of the United Nations with the primary goal of preventing such wars.2 Prevention, of course, must be based on the recognition that all humans are fundamentally the same, rather than on an emphasis on our differences. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, President John F. Kennedy, in an address to the former Soviet Union, underscored the necessity for recognizing similarities for our survival: [L]et us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved .... For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.3 That we are all fundamentally the same, all human, all with the same dignity and rights, is at the core of the most important document to come out of World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the two treaties that followed it (together known as the "International Bill of Rights").4 The recognition of universal human rights, based on human dignity and equality as well as the principle of nondiscrimination, is fundamental to the development of a species consciousness. As Daniel Lev of Human Rights Watch/Asia said in 1993, shortly before the Vienna Human Rights Conference: Whatever else may separate them, human beings belong to a single biological species, the simplest and most fundamental commonality before which the significance of human differences quickly fades .... We are all capable, in exactly the same ways, of feeling pain, hunger, and a hundred kinds of deprivation. Consequently, people nowhere routinely concede that those with enough power to do so ought to be able to kill, torture, imprison, and generally abuse others .... The idea of universal human rights shares the recognition of one common humanity. and provides a minimum solution to deal with its miseries.5 Membership in the human species is central to the meaning and enforcement of human rights, and respect for basic human rights is essential for the survival of the human species. …