Torture

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

Are healthcare professionals working in Australia's immigration detention centres condoning torture?

Abstract: Australian immigration detention centres are in secluded locations, some on offshore islands, and are subject to extreme secrecy, comparable with ‘black sites’ elsewhere. There are parallels between healthcare professionals working in immigration detention centres and healthcare professionals involved with or complicit in torture. In both cases, healthcare professionals are conflicted between a duty of care to improve the health of patients and the interests of the government. While this duality of interests has been recognised previously, the full implications for healthcare professionals working in immigration detention have not been addressed. The Australian Government maintains that immigration detention is needed for security checks, but the average duration of immigration detention has increased from 10 weeks to 14 months, and detainees are not informed of the progress of their application for refugee status. Long-term immigration detention causes major mental health problems, is illegal in international law and arguably fulfils the recognised definition of torture. It is generally accepted that healthcare professionals should not participate in or condone torture. Australian healthcare professionals thus face a major ethical dilemma: patients in immigration detention have pressing mental and physical health needs, but providing healthcare might support or represent complicity in a practice that is unethical. Individual healthcare professionals need to decide whether or not to work in immigration detention centres. If they do so, they need to decide for how long and to what extent restrictive contracts and gagging laws will constrain them from advocating for closing detention centres.

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.

Physicians at War: The Dual-Loyalties Challenge

Abstract: Preface Introduction: Allhoff Physicians at War: The Dual-Loyalties Challenge Section 1: Physicians and Dual-Loyalties IDLWG: Dual-loyalty & Human Rights in Health Professional Practice... Frisina: Guidelines to Prevent the Malevolent Use of Physicians in War Marks: Dual Disloyalties: Law and Medical Ethics at Guantanamo Bay Pearce/Saul: Toward a Framework for Military Health Ethics Section 2:Physicians and Torture Allhoff: Physician Involvement in Hostile Interrogations Matthews:Indecent Medicine Revisited: Considering Physician Involvement in Torture Lunstroth: Torture and the Regulation of the Health Care Professions Section 3: Physicians and Weapons Development Gross: Is Medicine a Pacifist Vocation or: Should Doctors Help Build Bombs? Nathanson: The Case against Doctor Involvement in Weapons Design and Development Selgelid: Armed Conflict and Value Conflict: Case Studies in Biological Weapons Miller/Selgelid: Ethics and the Dual-Use Dilemma in the Life Sciences Section 4: Physicians on the Battlefield Adams: Triage Priorities and Military Physicians List: Medical Neutrality and Political Activism: Physicians' Roles in Conflict Situations Appendices: WMA Regulations in Time of Armed Conflict WMA Statement on Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment CEJA Physician Participation in Interrogation.

Trust Building from the Perspective of Survivors of War and Torture

Abstract: Although various scholars acknowledge the presence of distrust among refugees who are survivors of war and torture, and the negative effects of this distrust on interactions with helping professionals, little is known about trust building. Drawing on the theoretical insights of the symbolic interactionist perspective, I contend that the survivor of war and torture, in determining the trustworthiness of the professional, collects and interprets interactional cues along three interrelated parameters: self‐concept, perceived self (i.e., what the survivor believes the professional thinks of him or her), and definition of the professional as a significant other.