Is Torture Ever Justified?

Introduction

The issues, related to tortures, have been utterly controversial for a long period of time already. Torture is generally defined as “the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological pain and possibly injury to an organism, usually to one who is physically restrained or otherwise under the torturer’s control or custody and unable to defend against what is being done to him or her.” (Rejali 1994). The cases of torturing individuals are known from ancient times till nowadays in various countries and either officially or not officially conducted. Reasons for such activities are different, mostly they are punishment, political re-education or revenge, they could be personal or not personal, in some cases people experience satisfaction from watching or performing torturing to other individuals.  In such situations individuals are forced from inside by psychological pressure and need serious professional help. The final intentions of the tortures are also different, either this could be to kill the victim or just to prolong the suffering until it turns out to be fatal. Sometimes tortures were parts of capital punishment. The type of torture chosen, as well as its length and methods, depends directly upon the final aim. Some countries acknowledged application of tortures legally, in other countries tortures were prohibited by domestic laws and they subdued to international prohibition laws. Starting from the 20th century tortures are generally considered to be serious violation of human rights and correspondingly could not be performed according to Article 5 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of the international legal prohibitions are based on the assumption that torture belongs to the sphere of immoral and impractical actions, performed by some individuals to other individuals. A lot of international organizations considered the issues of abuses of human rights, including the practice of torturing. These organizations include Amnesty International, the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims and so on. Still this doesn’t mean that all the controversies, related to acceptance of torturing, were solved finally. A lot of countries in the world, including America, claim to follow the international banning of torturing practice and still there are a lot of cases of application of tortures towards prisoners or dissidents in democratic countries; the situation in other countries is even worse. Advocates of human rights are concerned about the waves of terrorism and use of torturing as normal practices, which unfortunately tend to destroy moral authorities of single countries and globally. Thus there is a serious controversy, whether gaining of information or punishment are worth it or are absolutely not acceptable in modern societies for the sake of the future generations.

History

Ancient times

Such practice as torturing has a rather long history. There are numerous proofs of it, which were received by researchers from paintings on Egyptian wall or from artifacts from ancient Greece. According to the laws in ancient Greece and ancient Rome it was allowed to torture foreigners and slaves, but not free citizens. It was allowed to beat, to whip to stretch slaves on the rack till they die.  “The use of torture in Europe expanded in the 13th century after Italian city-states began to require stricter proof of guilt in criminal trials. Before that, guilt or innocence was proven by combat or endurance trials in which God was expected to favor the innocent.” (Waldron 2007). After the reforms an individual could be found guilty only under the condition that there were two witnesses, testifying against him. In case there were no witnesses, torture was purely used for confessions and this practice was applied for a sufficiently long period of the next 500 years. One of the widespread cases of applying of torture was related to public punishment of prisoners. There was a crowd gathered and a prisoner was put under a pile of weights, which were so hard that were crushing until he confessed or was dead. “Britain’s King Henry VIII used torture against those who challenged his position as head of the Church of England. Queen Elizabeth I employed torture against those suspected of treason.” (Waldron 2007). During the times, when the Roman Catholic Church was fighting with heresy, its inquisition used a whole range of torture methods. Moreover, in 1252 tortures were officially authorized. One of the most widespread types of tortures was the use of the special wheel, which could bring some part of human body closer to fire. In Italy weights were attached to the feet of a person, who was hanging down and sometimes they were so hard that were able to tear his limbs from his body.

Reconsideration of approach towards tortures

At the beginning of the 17th century there were the first attempts to regulate tortures made. Johannes Voet was a Dutch schlolar, he provided his assumptions that tortures are acceptable only in case an individual is accused of something. He offered to try the kind of torture on the youngest member of the defendants’ group, as he was most luckily to talk.

Prussia was the fist European state, which accepted the position against tortures at all. Cesare Beccaria was a well-known Italian philosopher and he also investigated the issues of tortures in his book On Crims and Punishments. He wrote that “a sure route for the acquittal of robust ruffians and the conviction of weak innocents.” (Waldron 2007).  This book was later on appreciated by the supporters of the human rights fighters. Only a century later, most of the European countries decided to ban tortures, only such countries as Africa, Asia, Middle East continued to use such practices. “By 1874, French author Victor Hugo naively declared “torture has ceased to exist.” But torture continued to be used against insurgents in Austria and Italy and against opponents of the Tsarist government in Russia.” (Waldron 2007).

Attitudes towards tortures in the 20th century

The 20th century brought significant changes to the generally accepted social norms, as for example public spectacles with tortures were not considered to be a kind of norm any more. It is not that tortures were absolutely avoided, but they were practiced in some closed basements, like prisons or detention centers for example. Some of the totalitarian governments, like those of Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia continued to apply tortures. Terrible tortures and medical experiments were conducted in the concentration camps of the Nazis. At the same time this new wave of tortures’ spreading, brought reconsideration of the international norms, which were fixed by a number of important treaties “the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1984 Convention Against Torture.” (Waldron 2007).

Apart of authoritarian governments, there were also such countries, as Vietnam, El Salvador, where tortures were practiced in the process of their resistance to communist insurgencies. America continued to provide guns and military aid to those countries, because they were confronting communism, even though they used tortures. In the 1970s President Jimmy Carter raised the question of human rights, which needed to be considered and supported in his country and Congress passed the corresponding law, according to which annuals reports needed to be provided in order to seize better control over the situation with fulfillment of human rights laws.

Thus historically this is evident, that approach to tortures has immensely changed starting from ancient times and till modern days. People started to appreciate their lives and their rights much more and this became one of the basic notions for any developed societies and the aim for developing countries. Still the debates concerning the effectiveness of tortures are still not over.

Effectiveness of tortures

What is really surprising about these debates is the fact that the same evidence could be treated from different sides by supporters and opponents of tortures. “Take the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a senior al Qaeda operative and the alleged principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents — reportedly using waterboarding — before being transferred to military custody at Guantánamo.” (Parry 2010). He confessed of 31 terrorist operations, planning of the 9/11 attacks in America, beheading of Daniel Pearl, who was a reporter of Wall Street Journal. Later, however, he was named to be a “poster boy” for using legal tactics, the existence of whom could explain the existence of these tactics. At the same time the opponents of these methods were convinced that one individual could not be an organizer of so many terrorist plots and revealed their skepticism in relation to his claims. They stated that taking into consideration the types of tortures, which could be applied to an individual, there is never a guarantee that his confessions are true to life and were not made purely with the aim to stop tortures and remain alive. This argument makes everybody doubt as for effectiveness of tortures. “For instance, a torture victim deprived of his clothes will feel so “ashamed and humiliated and cold,” said retired FBI counterterrorism agent Dan Coleman, “he’ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothing back. There’s no value in it.” (Parry 2010). There are other cases, when people, who are so much committed to their religious ideology for example, would prefer to die because of pain or injures and would not agree to talk. In such cases tortures could also be hardly considered to be effective, as they practically lead to a murder of an individual and nothing more. Often tortures are seen as rather effective as preventive means, when they are applied towards dissidents or guerrillas with the aim of stopping other individuals from joining in their groups. In this case “the real purpose of torture is oppression of one or the other kind, to send a signal to anyone who is an opponent that there is a very, very grave risk.” (Parry 2010).

When considering all arguments, related to effectiveness of tortures, it is important to underline that there is no scientific evidence, which could support that tortures are able to work. There has not been as single thorough and many-sided investigation or research of systematic tortures and injuries and evaluation of the outcomes of them. Actually there is no concrete mechanism or method for identification of the effectiveness of tortures, in other words, it is not possible to reveal significant arguments either for or against it.

Justification of tortures

In 2005 an Australian law Professor Mirko Bagaric assumed that there are cases, when tortures could be morally justified. He wrote “Given the choice between inflicting a relatively small level of harm on a wrongdoer and saving an innocent person, it is verging on moral indecency to prefer the interests of the wrongdoer.” (Parry 2010). Another concrete example he provided, was the situation, when an individual takes hostages and threatens to kill innocent people, unless his demands are fulfilled, so it is more correct for the police officers to kill him, than let him damage those people. Still the opponents of torture are sure that perfect scenarios are possible only in movies, and not in real lives and that tortures could not be seen as a method to solve problems with terrorist attacks or other criminal activities.

Conclusion

Overall, the attitude towards torture, as a way of punishment, getting of the needed information, preventive means and so on, has been reconsidered within the long history of humanity; various countries developed their approaches towards treating of the issue and issued various laws for proper regulating of them. However, even taking into consideration the significant changes in perception of human rights, and acknowledgement of their importance nowadays, the problem of tortures, their effectiveness and justification is still not solved.

Works cited:

Danner, M.  “Our New Politics of Torture”. The New York Review of Books, 2015

Doswald-Beck, L. Human Rights in Times of Conflict and Terrorism. Praeger; 1 edition, 2011

Parry, J. T. Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010

Reddy, P. Torture: What You Need to Know, Ginninderra Press, Canberra, Australia, 2005

 Rejali, D. M. Torture & Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994

Sanford, L. Torture: A Collection. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006

Waldron, J. The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Boston Review Books). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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