No Middle Ground

Abstract

Torture is coming in from the cold, becoming respectable, increasingly talked about not as an issue of condemnation but whether and how it may be used. In our own backyard, for instance, the court of appeal ruled that British courts were allowed to use evidence obtained under torture in the cases of terrorist suspects, as long as British officials were not complicit in the torture. The UN Convention Against Torture, to which the UK is a signatory, says that ‘any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings’. This way, as Conor Gearty says, the UK ‘remains a torture-free zone but its moral purity is secured through the iniquity of others’. Attitudes to torture have been central to the history of liberal democracy and individual rights. During the Enlightenment, torture was eliminated from the penal process, and there was a brief moment, after World War II, when a plethora of human rights declarations seemed finally, as Stanley Cohen says, to signal ‘victory for the abolitionist case’. But torture did not go away. Later in the twentieth century came torture in the name of national security and self defence – by France in Algeria, Israel in the Occupied Territories and Britain in Northern Ireland – often accompanied by the euphemisms with which we’re becoming familiar again: ‘special procedures’, moderate physical pressure’, ‘depth interrogations’. And now we have a ‘war on terror’ and there are clear messages from governments of every variety that we must have access to the product of torture (this despite the fact that it is fairly widely accepted that evidence obtained this way is unreliable). The images coming out of Abu Ghraib prison have become not just symbols in the Islamic world of the horrors the US inflicts on Muslims, but justifications for the use of torture by other countries. And in the groves of academe there is now serious discussion about regulation. In our new world order, the argument goes, we need torture, even if we are against it; we should not cover it up but have it supervised by judicial bureaucrats – with controls, restrictions and guidelines. The Abu Ghraib images also force us to look at who we are and with what we are complicit. With torture there is no middle ground. Accepting its official use, perhaps more than anything else, must surely lead us to ask whether such a change of attitude to human rights and civil liberties constitutes a kind of defeat for us – and a victory for the terrorists