Torture

Generally a right to be free from torture (and inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment) is absolute. It's one of the few rights that is completely absolute and has no exceptions.

With that said, one can think of scenarios where torturing an individual can yield important information which may save 100s or 1000s of lives (I'm thinking here about the conventional yet rare scenario of a terrorist being held by authorities who knows where a ticking bomb but will not reveal it's whereabouts). Should authorities be allowed to use torture in those circumstances?

Do you think that torture should not be an absolute right? ie that it should have exceptions say when national security or necessity require it's use.

Do you think that torture can be morally justified?

What do you think about reliability of information/evidence obtained through torture? Is it inherently unreliable thus making torture a redundant and fruitless technique of intelligence gathering?

The topic of torture provided a rather lively debate in my class recently with a real diversity in views. I'm wondering what biggies think of it all...

Anything testable is perfectly reliable.

Where is the bomb? Bad guy tells you, go have a look, find the bomb, job done.

Where is the bomb? Bad guy tells you, go have a look, don't find the bomb, bomb goes off, terrorist's job done.

never justified

studies have shown information gained under torture is very unreliable as people will say anything to stop being tortured

has torture done anything to win the war on terror - no but it has done a lot to erode many peoples view of the USA, as an example

Tracy Barnett in today's Herald

This. Moral, yes, reliable, no.

Define torture?

Stress positions? Lack of sleep? Drug assisted interrogation?

I think there are some situations where torture could reveal useful information which is easily and quickly tested. In fact i would imagine that give its wide spread use they have achieved some benefit from it or they wouldn't continue. I dont think the whole 'it gives useless info' argument is as valid as some make out.

Assuming we are talking about what most people think of as torture (knives, beatings etc) there are only a few dire situations that i could *possibly* consider it ok and all of those would be along the lines proposed at the beginning with an identified terrorist or the like.

BUT once you cross that line.... so i would have to go with no, it shouldnt be used.

On the definition of torture thing - at some level you could call normal imprisonment torture so im a little more pragmatic about it than others. I hate to justify some actions but the truth is there are some nasty people out there and sometimes, some people need to be bad arses to fight them. Look at some of our most successful cops, they didnt play by the strict interpretation of the law. If they had they wouldnt have been so successful.

Why have you only specified torture in the extreme case of terrorism? I'm surprised we don't use it more commonly. The US government failed in its use of torture because it used it willy nilly - not the best PR angle.

Torture directed at someone who you know is with holding information is different to torturing someone because he had a beard or was wearing a turban.

Take the Kahui twins murder case. Two babies living under the same roof as the family that was in the house when the babies died. The babies had suffered trauma which resulted in their deaths. Not one single person in the house owns up to the murder......

How much tax payers' money has been pissed away on this case and at the end of it who has been held accountable? Would torture have yielded better / quicker results in this investigation? My guess is yes.

Youd torture all of the family to work out which one did it?

Thats potentially 4 innocent people to catch one person... not a good ratio.

even 99 guilty to 1 innocent is a shite ratio - do you plan on giving them all the money you saved on trials to pay compensation?

they're harbouring and protecting a murderer......protecting the criminals isn't really that much worse than being the criminal.

the information the people tortured give up is accurate/usable/trustworthy?

cases have shown tortured people will say whatever they feel the torturer wants to hear to stop the process - this is surely fundamentally at odds with our (any?) sense of justice and refutes the use of torture to get anything but rubbish intelligence

3 things

a: Do you know for a fact all of them know who did it?

b: You believe harbouring a criminal is punishable by torture?

c: the outcome in this case is a he said/she said which isnt like to be able to be confirmed either way but you still want to torture them?

Your stunted rationale is the reason on the whole i do not support things like torture and the death penalty. You need to be a lot more discriminate in your proposed use of it.

look if you torutre all of them and all of them point the finger at the same guy......then it's likely a safe bet to arrest the person they all pointed the finger at.

but if you torture all of them and they all point the finger at each other - then you can say that the information is unreliable / inconclusive.

there are ways around these things, I never said it was a piss easy process I just said that torture should have been available as an option.

and yes I'm pretty much positive they all knew who did it. the way these families live is pretty much a no secrets environment. they raise / discipline each other's kids without boundaries. so I find it hard to believe that the only person who knew the identity of the criminal was the criminal himself, it wasn't that kind of household.

pretty much sure...


says it all really.

or is this the person they had decided to be the fall guy?

and then even if you get the right person what do you tell the others - sorry we tortured you but one of you had tortured a innocent child and this resulted in their death and we had to find the guilty party

here's $20 for ya troubles

no fucking way I want to live in a society that condones such actions

if they had decided on one of them to be the fall guy, then you can hardly say that it was the torture that caused them to provide unreliable information, it was in fact their collusion and intentional obstruction of justice that led them to provide unreliable information - the torture doesn't even come into it?

If they had decided on a fall guy, they would just point the finger at him from the get go, they wouldn't wait to be tortured for it......

And why do you even apologise to the other 4?

You would only apologise to them if it turns out that they genuinely did not know who the murderer was, which is highly unlikely in a house that had that many people in it, that not one of them (if not all of them) knew who the killer was.

Ah the ends justifying the means reasoning….if we employ that we could justify a lot more than mere torture to get the information of the whereabouts of the bomb.

what does torture have to do with Kahui twins?



Just in relation to some of the comments in the thread, I don’t really think the rather extreme and rare scenario of a ticking time bomb and a terrorist who knows it's whereabouts helps this debate much though it does illustrate – I guess – the difficulties with insisting that prohibition on torture must be absolute.

But aside from that, I expect that most torture occurs in secret locations, is conducted by executive special agencies (MI5, CIA, etc), is done on a need-to-know basis, is used as an aide to ordinary interrogation techniques, and is used against persons whom the agency believes (usually I would hope on perfectly valid grounds) have information which the agency would like to obtain. The question therefore is whether torture should be used in those circumstances – because that is the vast majority of torture scenarios.

Now my answer to that question is no. I regard it as an unnecessary and unwarranted invasion against the individual’s dignity and humanity, as well as an unjustified interference with the individual’s fundamental human rights. But in addition to that, and on a more practical level, there are alternative methods of intelligence gathering which would yield more reliable information – in fact the powers that these special agencies have these days to gather information are quite vast, do they really need the power to torture too?

Also, some of you have asked how one defines torture. The Courts define it as an aggravated form of inhuman and degrading treatment done with a particular purpose (generally intelligence gathering). So we are talking about cruel grossly humiliating treatment of an individual (beating, rape, mock executions, sleep/food/water deprivation, wall standing, exposure to noise, etc – and combinations of such). That definition could be our starting point…

People will say whatever they think will make the torture stop.

This has been proven time and time again in wartime.

It is NOT AN EFFECTIVE METHOD OF GATHERING INFORMATION

Not only that, but if you torture people, you arouse opposition, and it's thus a counter-productive mechanism

The rebuttal (if one were to attempt to do so) would go something along the lines of:

If enough lives are at stake, why limit yourself in the ways to obtain the information you require.

Thing is, many of those things that at an extreme are torture, occur on a low level in even normal police interrogation situations. Threat of imprisonment and harm (that happens in prisons), waiting long periods, chairs that you cant sit comfortably in, isolation etc.

I dont see it as an absolute but i believe i fully understand the problems on both sides.

why then are torture techniques still employed? are Mi5, the CIA and the like just retarded? a bunch of vile sadists? in face of all controversy and all that is wrong with it (from a civil liberties perspective) they continue to do it. SURELY they do it because it DOES yield reliable information or at the least reliable lines of inquiry?

BG - perhaps they use torture because of the pressure they are under to provide any information to back up their nutbar leaders delusions

perhaps - though i have a slightly less cynical view of these agencies and believe, well, hope that when they do horrific things to people they do it for 'good' reasons....

if they do indeed employ torture techniques, then they are in fact retarded.

chain of command BG - the higher ups may do things with good intentions but by the time you get down to the full time torturer I doubt such motivations exist (or last for long)

in relation to the US actions, we must remember the call to torture didn't come from those on the coalface who gather and analyse information all day every day, the decision(s) came down from the top from those wanting to find ticking timebombs

Or it's a mentality of "any information is better than no information". I could see how that would become a prevailing, driving view in that line of work

Have you seen 'Taxi to the Dark Side' yet BG? Fascinating doco on this topic; one of the best I've seen recently.

Personally, I have no moral problem with 'torture' that isn't excessively painful or humiliating in nature, or doesn't specifically target cultural sore-spots or anything like that. I don't oppose trickery, misdirection etc to get information. If there were a drug that had no real risk of permanent damage and was reliable in eliciting truth (like a truth serum), I would be all for that.

But as vads says (and as I've learned throughout the doco mentioned) - it doesn't seem that the methods traditionally employed are very reliable overall.

People forget it doesn't work.

It's counter-intuitive too, because it sounds like it should work.

Sir William Holdsworth (A History of English Law, vol 5, 3rd ed (1945), pp 194-195,

"We have seen that the use of torture, though illegal by the common law, was justified by virtue of the extraordinary power of the crown which could, in times of emergency, override the common law. We shall see that Coke in the earlier part of his career admitted the existence of this extraordinary power. He therefore saw no objection to the use of torture thus authorized. But we shall see that his views as to the existence of this extraordinary power changed, when the constitutional controversies of the seventeenth century had made it clear that the existence of any
extraordinary power in the crown was incompatible with the liberty of the subject. It is not surprising therefore, that, in his later works, he states broadly that all torture is illegal. It always had been illegal by the common law, and the authority under which it had been supposed to be legalized he now denied. When we consider the revolting brutality of the continental criminal procedure, when we remember that this brutality was sometimes practised in England by the authority of the extraordinary power of the crown, we cannot but agree that this single result of the rejection of any authority other than that of the common law is almost the most valuable of the many consequences of that rejection. Torture was not indeed practised so systematically in England as on the continent; but the factthat it was possible to have recourse to it, the fact that the most powerful court in the land sanctioned it, was bound sooner or later to have a demoralising effect upon all those who had prisoners in their power. Once torture has become acclimatized in a legal system it spreads like an infectious disease. It saves the labour of investigation. It hardens and brutalizes those who have become accustomed to use it."

=> testable

Who mentioned justified?? I was just pointing out that many things are easily and immediately testable. Thus largely nullifying the ‘information obtained is worthless because it is unreliable’ argument.

btw; If you ignore the ‘justification’ part of the issue for a second, then torture has historically done quite well achieving its goals. People will point to false ‘confessions’ etc as a failure of torture, but I think this couldn’t be further from the truth. In the majority of these cases the false confessions were the actual intent of the torture. For political reasons or whatever the torturers wanted their victims to ‘confess’ to these things that they never did! That was the goal.

ie the likes of Stalin could have just executed the lot without bothering with the whole show trial / confessions bollocks, but he clearly thought it would look better politically to have his enemies confessing to and being punished for some ‘crime’. So that’s exactly what he did.


Would torturing the whole Kauhi family to find out who killed the babies work? Absolutely.
Would it be justified? Clearly not.

So because a proposition is 'testable' nullifies any claim that it is 'unreliable'???? The proposition that the Earth is flat is testable, but it's clearly unreliable. Studies have shown that information obtained through torture is unreliable - what does that say about the validity of torture as an interrogation technique?

I think what trapper means to say is that the ability to immediately “test the information and validate it”, in some situations, means that you cannot completely discount the fact that the information obtained under torture might be true. Thus, simply using the line of reasoning that “information obtained under torture is worthless because it is unreliable” is not an absolute certainty. Situations may arise whereby a certain piece of information can be validated fairly quickly, and interrogators may feel that the use of torture should not be discounted, because they may still have a 10% chance that the information is true, and they are confident that the validation of that information can be performed

When you think about the use of torture and the studies that have shown that it has mostly yielded unreliable information (and I’m assuming it’s a majority of cases and not every instance) – then the decision to use it is quite similar to a doctor telling a cancer patient, “Look, you’ve got less than 48 hours to live. There is a procedure we can undertake to save you, but it only has a 10% chance of success. The choice is yours.”

I’m not in anyway even proposing that the morality (or legality) behind the torture or cancer patient’s decision as being the same. What I think is similar is the fact that both the torturer and patient is then making a decision based on probability vs the outcome – it becomes situational and it can almost become devoid of any moral arguments.

Consider these two situations:

Yes there is a 90% chance I might die if I undertake surgery, but there is also a 10% chance that it might save my life, or I’ll die in 48 hours anyway.

Yes there is a 90% chance that what he tells me is false and NY residents die anyway if I use torture, but there is also a 10% chance that it might be true and I can save NY residents, or NY residents die anyway in 48 hours.

On a purely logical basis, in both situations you are likely to commit to the surgery or torture:

- Inaction means that death is a 100% certainty (die in 48 hours)
- Action means that death is a 90% certainty BUT;
- Action also means that survival has a 10% certainty

And yes, while we recognise that there are other options available, I think that perhaps the urgency of the situation in both time and substance, will add additional weight to each additional 1% of chance that survival might be achieved. So again, it becomes situational.

The problem, as we all recognise, is that this line of thinking needs to be completely devoid of morality; which (and I will be flamed for this), to be honest, is also pure objectivity.

A better example might be an encrypted laptop. Enter the password or we continue to torture you. The correct password would be validated immediately.

I too suspect that they must have had *some* success with extracting info form them to risk the problems that appear to have bitten them in the arse.

would torture have found WMD in Iraq?
would it find Bin Laden?
would torturing people solve the question of is Clint Rickards guilty?


the encripted password example seems fine on the surface... if you've the intelligence and good fortune to capture someone that actually knows the combination

the pro torture examples all fall down in the same manner - unless you have the right person the whole exercise is futile... and this is where the US and co have fucked up time and time again with the result that millions (billions?) of people in the world now hate/distrust the USA - a fucking high price to pay for the lack of WMD, no bin laden etc etc

I’d also like to put forth these 2 situations to consider:

One country invades another and they engage in war. Soldiers from the defending nation slash, shoot and bomb to kill their enemies and defend their nation and her people. When they do this, they know for certain that they are trying to kill the enemy. But how the enemy dies as a result of the soldiers’ actions are uncertain. They can die instantly, or through slow and excruciating pain from losing limbs or something (through bombings for eg). Whether or not their actions will save their nation is also uncertain. But what’s certain is that the defending army is likely to kill some or all of the invading army – so the invading soldiers are likely to die.

Now in another situation, terrorists have planted bombs in cities across a nation. Intelligence agents capture terrorist agents and use torture as one of their methods in trying to save their people. Whether or not the information is correct, is uncertain. Whether or not lives will be saved is also uncertain. What’s probably certain is that the terrorist is likely to die.

Is the only difference between the two situations, the fact that the soldier doesn’t knowingly commit the act of killing his enemy slowly and painfully, whereas the torturer does?

the difference is the soldiers/defenders aren't trying to extract accurate usable information from the invaders, simply to cease their invasion

In saying that though, I'm not at any point supporting the use of torture as a justifiable mean to obtain information, regardless of the situation.

The reason why I said it's situational is because I recognise the fact that in some situations, the choice of using torture may be warranted, not morally, but maybe objectively.

However, like some have said the benefits must greatly outweigh the costs.

Capturing white collar fraudsters doesn't justify the use of torture in any sense.

But when you know you have a bomb in the middle of Auckland, with the only "unknown" being the location - would the risk and cost justify the potential benefit, no matter how small the chance?

I think that is a question that many are only to quick to answer, until they're put into that situation themselves.

this situation is a complete no brainer - any means necessary

but actions taken have consequences... and once crossing that moral line is there a way back?

Hilter wanted the jews to simply fuck off. Once the Nazis started down this path....

Is the end objective of protecting the lives of their people not the same though?

In the first situation, the war is being fought through direct confrontation. In the second, it's being fought using guerilla tactics (forgive the terminology).

Yeah, I was kinda using that as an example that I'm not condoning for torture for just anything at all.

But I do recognise that some situations may call for it.

I didn't say it was an easy choice either.

no one is saying its an easy choice, thankfully

.....so Karhoo says that torture may occasionally be a valid form of interrogation and suddenly you're willing to entertain that idea. Nice.

no I am still of the opinion that torture cannot be justified 100% of the time

But I have also stated the caveats with it - one of them being that preventing the deaths of thousands sets a much, much higher threshold of conscience and justification whenever the use of torture as an option comes into consideration.

But as I also recognise the dangers in setting any sort of threshold as an automatic trigger for justification. It's very, very situational. All I can say is that I'm thankful don't have to make such decisions, and never do.

For those "the ends justify the means" - if there was a bomb in the middle of Auckland and the guy who knew where it was would only reveal it if you slaughtered a thousand Iraqis, would you do it?

weak. how the fuck would you prove that you killed a thousand iraqis and not 999?

do you need to produce a thousand death certificates for him to peruse through?

Utterly irrelevant. What I'm trying to point out is that if the ends justify the means, what ends? What means? Is killing a thousand Iraqis satisfactory if you save one New Zealander? What if you save a thousand and one New Zealanders?

When we torture, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Military's and police use torture because it is all they know.

They are professionals at what they do. Whom are we as New Zealanders to judge, many of us have never experienced bombs going off and shredding 100 people to bits.

I am not for or againts, I am one of the many here who just dont know that isn't afraid to admit - I dont know.

So why get all emotional about it team? some say it hasn't worked, some say it has - any of you special police men from Israel?

Dont think so.

Why does it always have to be about terrorists and Iraq anyway?.

Its happening all over the world, even in the so called developed 'Australia'.

Hell, even in some NZ police stations!

yeah fair enough I knew what you were getting at but it was a bit too contrived to be taken seriously.

In any case I think you'll find that the "end justifies the means" would have proven quite effective on 9/11 had it been properly carried out. The idea was to shoot the planes before they hit their targets. either way people were going to die but would you rather have 700 people on those 3 planes dying or would you rather have the 5000 or so that died in the towers.....

I think you'll find that the end justifies the means in A LOT more cases than you think.

I dont think torture should be off the table, humans have intentionally killed tens of millions of our own in the last hundred years and war continues. Every day, all over the world, there are conversations along the lines of "tell me where the bomb is" "No" <BANG>.

Our own species proves over and over that an individual's life is NOT sacred.

Remember in all of this there's the deterrent it provides, shooting down planes shows you're prepared to do it and seriously heightens the risk of trying to use planes as a weapon.

Same with the threat of torture.

I would bet you $500 that no NZ personnel have tortured anybody (under orders) in the last 15 years

Regardless of the kill:save ratio you've still committed murder or an act of inhumanity.

There are no excuses for it. The ends may allow you some justification to paint what you did in a different way but does it really change the nature of the act itself? No.

I agree with you there and at no point did I make any excuses or alluded to the fact that you can.

In fact, I’ve stated before that killing one, or many, doesn’t change the fact that you’re a murderer. Torturing 1, or 1000, to save 10 000, may at some level relieve the perpetrator of some guilty conscience and it may even be argued (if you took it to an extreme) that the act was necessary; but it doesn’t change the fact that you have murdered or tortured.

Degree does change the extent of your act, but it doesn’t absolve you of the act itself.

When I said this last there were some that disagreed with me on this proposition.

And you are very much probably right, we are lucky like that

Funny that the ends justify the means for vaccines but not for anti-terrorism.

I was one of the people who disagreed because it was ridiculous and defied common sense

at least in the context of the China FTA thread

karhoo1, I think you make a valid point. it certainly is the case that in a ticking time bomb scenario there may in fact be justification for use of torture. likewise, as you point out there may be circumstances where reliability of information obtained through torture can be readily ascertained. this has led a number of commentators to suggest that absolute prohibition on torture is misconceived and if anything, places torture techniques beyond reach of any authorities which might regulate it in a way that provides some level of protection for the suspect.

i fear that any derogation from absolute prohibition on torture is highly problematic. furthermore i think that most scenarios where torture occurs (and i have set this out in my earlier post) are not ticking time bomb scenarios but rather standard interrogation situations where in my opinion use of torture is unacceptable. and finally, given the breadth of intelligence gathering powers these agencies have in their fight against terrorism, in my view they do not need nor should be granted power to torture as well. i therefore tend to agree with prohibition.

So you disagree with this proposition or was it something else in the China FTA thread that you disagreed with?

I can't be bothered backtracking through that thread to see what was said, but this current one (in this thread) was the gist of my thinking then.

Maybe in that thread I didn't get my point across as well as I could have, but essentially, the above was still what I meant to get through.

But if you disagree with the proposition altogether than I'm happy to accept our differences here, not least because your opinion is one that I respect

Now while acknowledging the above, and assuming full prohibition is put in place, what difference does it make if the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies still employ torture as an interrogation technique?

Some of those who already employ it are the same people purporting to be defenders of justice, preachers of democracy and guardians of human rights.

Surely in all their sense of logic and righteousness, they know that they contradict themselves when they authorise the use and practise of torture.

No doubt in some circumstances, the justification behind those actions may have been humanly accepted as a reasonable excuse – but regardless of that fact, they know in their conscience that they are deliberately causing inhumane pain and suffering in order to achieve their outcome (lets assume here even, that the outcome was successful).

So the one thing we know for certain, is that at some level there is sufficient justification to place the mind’s of the CIAs of this world at peace, and allow them to use torture while allaying the guilt on their own conscience, the knowledge that they are raping the very human tenets that they’re supposed to preserve, and the fact that if the same thing had been done to one of their own, they would have ferociously objected and even possibly declared war.

When you consider this, then my question is what prohibition will do? It can be passed into law, and I’m sure it will provide ample grounds and excuse to persecute the lesser powers of this world. But for the people that I speak of above, if they have managed to subvert their own good conscience already, then no amount of regulation will stop them anyway.

I am talking about the extreme end here as to the agencies and persons who would and will use torture, and this is because anything to the lesser end of that (such as finding out who stole bank details), I find no justification at all as to why torture should even be considered as a form of interrogation.

Odd how people quietly accept an official policy to utterly obliterate an entire nation (and untold millions of completely innocent people) as a response to a nuclear attack on a US city.

Yet at the same time so vocally oppose a policy (even a non-official one) that might prevent an attack of this nature from occurring - on the grounds of defending the actual perpetrators human rights!!

Torture is already absolutely prohibited - at least under international law. It is one of the very few rules in international law which has achieved the status of a peremptory norm (ie States are subject to prohibition on torture whether they like it or not and cannot derogate from it).

The fact that there is non-compliance by state agencies with the rule - and I think you are implicating US in your post - or the problem of enforcing the prohibition against torture on the international level does not negate the existence of the rule. Such is the volatility of all international law - it is a law based on consent of States, it has little to no coercive force.

My argument is that if anything once you start to deviate from the absolute prohibition in the legal sense (ie you start saying that in certain circumstances torture is permitted) then you run the risk of bringing about an even worse state of affairs, where torture is legitimized ( in the legal sense) and supposedly regulated but we all know that regulation is nearly impossible.

you can thank your beloved profession and their craving for dissembling and splitting hairs for this deviation post 9/11

if it weren't for Dick Cheney and his ilk this sorry state of affairs in the US would not likely have come to pass

You already lack an absolute in how to define torture though. Your earlier definition is fairly... optimistic.

Stress positions? masks, goggles and ear muffs to disorientate?

I'm not arguing against any proposition to legitimise torture.

I'm just lamenting the fact that countries like the US, which is one of but not the only culprit, will so blatantly use it even if they deny it (no, the rest of the world isn't stupid), yet if they are the bastion of the human rights then what should lesser countries look forward to?

And if they aren't the bastion of human rights, then their banner of freedom and democracy which they so often fights wars for collapses beneath them.

You see, the problem today isn't the fact that 80% of the world no longer regards the US as the champion of human rights.

The problem is that yesterday, they were the champions, and people around the world looked up to something. Nations obliged, agreed and even pledged to chase and achieve similar ideals.

And now, no one else, nation or otherwise, has risen to champion all these causes in the absence and downfall of the US (as the bastion of human rights).

You might argue the French, or any other western nation that still exists today. But none of them have the power, the voice, the conviction or the influence to hold other nations at sway. All there is, is a vaccuum that is continually sucking all meaning of what the US stood for into it, and along with that the principles of nations who would've followed it. At the very centre of that vaccuum is the US herself.

Maybe I'm not making myself clear. The prohibition on torture IS absolute. The definition of torture is also pretty settled - torture is an aggravated form of inhuman and degrading treatment. The techniques/methods which I referred to in my post come from decided cases where such were found to amount to torture and therefore violated international law.

Imo, the problem with torture is not it's prohibition nor it's definition, it's enforcement. But lack of enforcement is not in any way unique to torture, it's something that plagues any international legal rule especially those which government agencies wish to bend in order to protect their interests. Whether it's US torturing terrorism suspects or the cops in Botswana torturing a suspected robber to find out the identitiy of his accomplices, international law can do little to punish the perpetrators or prevent torture from being practiced. We must look to some other method of enforcement - but having said that, I personally can't think of one.

Uhh? Why should we be able to enforce something that isn't imposed by a sovereign?

As you well know, BG, international law is a set of customs followed by sovereign entities when they WISH to.

^^^did you not read this?



before you go off on another of your sovereign tangents and anticipating her repsonse

I think Vads is right here….


Because he’s trying to keep this thread from dying


But seriously though, this thread originally started with BG asking about what Biggies thought as to the morality of torture being used and whether or not we thought it could be justified given various caveats (all to do with the reason it is used for and the potential outcomes).

It wasn’t a legal discussion and it certainly wasn’t about enforcement of prohibition. It was about the act itself.

I think most, if not all of us, have answered the original question; that we don’t accept torture as morally justifiable, yet we do acknowledge that there certain situations which requires morality to be bent to achieve a far greater outcome. I don’t see anyone saying whether this is right or wrong. Mostly, we’re just happy it’s not us having to make those decisions.

Given the above, I think the thread has lived out its purpose.



A discussion around prohibition or the enforcement of it (in the sense of international law) – has nothing to do with torture specifically as it will encapsulate all forms of international law. In fact, the discussion would be more suited to target the “system of international law” itself; what’s broken, what’s not and what could be better (the discussion would be more about the ‘system’ than the law)?

So in fact, it was BG who started the tangent ( ) and Vads who made an attempt to stop this thread from dying (because…. CA is so dead nowadays… you guys must have found a life outside of the internet ….).

but his sovereignty rants are

tortuous and torturous

heh and CA is more lively now that every half intelligent thread in the lounge gets kicked in here

I don't like this throwing threads into CA action...

its great to be able to see/hear peoples opinions in both forums... instead of the what 10 of us here

Do I think Torture can be morally justified?




People still go see Celene Dion in concert don't they?

It's my thread karhoo1, I can introduce any tangent I like

I do think the discussion was progressing towards the issue of enforcement which you are right brings in broader questions of the system of international law and I would be quite interested in people's views on this... Furthermore, torture is a little unique in this sense because it operates as a peremptory norm of which there is only very few in international law.

So to continue vad's tangent, what do people think about enforcement of international legal rules? Because they are consensual in nature, have no coercive force and are not imposed by a sovereign - are they effectively unenforcable? Is that a good or bad thing?

as history has shown the peremptory norm is ignored time and time again and no enforcement of it takes place unless there be some extraordinary intervention involving invasion or such like but this usually occurs only after total breakdown

Cambodia
Uganda
Rwanda
Yugoslavia
Iraq

spring to mind among most recent examples