Amnesty International and the International Campaign Against Torture
At least part of the story behind the current role that the prohibition of torture plays in the popular imagination cannot be told without reference to Amnesty International (see Clark 2001; Power 2001). Indeed Amnesty International played a central role in documenting the allegations of ill-treatment in Northern Ireland and increasing the pressure on the Heath government. More broadly, Amnesty International was very significant in putting the prohibition of torture on the international agenda. The organization was founded in the early 1960s to campaign for the release of prisoners of conscience. Torture was not within its original mandate, and was only included in 1966 after much internal debate about the dilution of expertise and resources (Amnesty International 1976).45 The broadening of the mandate to include torture was given added impetus by a 1967 investigation into the treatment of political detainees in Greece, following the coup in April of the same year.46 A two-man team was originally sent to Athens simply to record “who was detained, where they were held, and why they had been arrested” (Amnesty International 1968, 1). However, when the men arrived they found evidence of what seemed to be systematic and deliberate abuse. The report of the trip concluded that torture was “deliberately and officially used”, and was a “widespread practice against Greek citizens suspected of active opposition” (1968, 3).
At the same time, an application had been brought against Greece in the European Commission of Human Rights by the three Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, alleging widespread breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights. Torture was not originally included in the submission but was added after the release of the Amnesty International report. In 1969, the commission found Greece in breach of the European Convention, including Article 3 prohibiting torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Crucially, although it did not impact the findings, the commission drew a distinction between the different parts of Article 3, describing torture as an “aggravated form of inhuman or degrading treatment.”47 For the first time, an intergovernmental organization had suggested that torture was of a higher degree of seriousness than the other forms of ill-treatment with which it had been associated since World War II.
Amnesty International was not the first organization to campaign against the use of torture. However, in the United Kingdom, at least, Amnesty International had the most popular appeal, and its methods of naming and shaming had the most impact on the general public. Important developments were also taking place in Latin America throughout the 1970s, and in many ways Amnesty International drew on this work. The Amnesty International campaign was given added impetus by the presence in Europe and North America of tens of thousands of articulate exiles from Latin America, Chile and Argentina in particular, who could give firsthand accounts of their treatment. Amnesty International’s campaigns worked alongside the lobbying from groups such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Barcelona-based but Argentina-focused, COSOFAM (Commission of Solidarity with Relatives of the Disappeared) (Robben 2005, 306–10; Sikkink 1993). Literary representations, such as Jacobo Timerman’s account of his abuse in an Argentinean jail, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, also added to the popular consciousness of widespread torture (1981). From the 1970s, Europe and North America were confronted with the systematic torture of people of European descent in a way that seem to remind them of Nazi Germany.
Amnesty International formally launched its Campaign Against Torture in December 1972, initially for one year. Until the early 1970s, Amnesty International employed no lawyers on its full-time staff, and its focus on torture was primarily moral in orientation. The first lawyer appointed on a full-time basis to Amnesty International, Nigel Rodley, would play a central role in the campaign. He would also add a new, stricter focus on international human rights law to Amnesty International’s work. After leaving Amnesty International, he went on to become the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and he sat on the UN Human Rights Committee. It is important to note that although the broadening of Amnesty International’s mandate in the late 1960s referred to all of Article 5 of the UDHR, the campaign left out “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Always quick to recognize the value of brevity and clarity, Amnesty International singled out torture for specific attention.
Torture was seen by Amnesty International as a singular and universal problem. It could therefore publish a Report on Torture between 1973 and 1975 and again in 1984, setting out the practice of torture from Albania to Zambia, via Chile, India, Israel, Morocco, Togo, Vietnam, and many others besides. Torture was the same thing wherever it took place and could be understood in the same terms. For Amnesty International, by 1973 “what for the last two or three hundred years has been no more than an historical curiosity, has suddenly developed a life of its own and become a social cancer” (1973, 7). Amnesty International sought to define torture as the “systematic and deliberate infliction of acute pain in any form by one person on another, or on a third person, in order to accomplish the purpose of the former against the will of the latter” (1973, 31). Torture here is organized rather than casual and includes the infliction of great suffering on the powerless by the powerful. Although not explicitly mentioned in this definition, the implicit assumption was that torture was carried out by the state, and all the examples documented refer to state torture. The possibility that torture might include domestic violence, for example, was simply not on the horizon.
Three features of this campaign warrant particular mention. The first is that Amnesty International did not simply work by lobbying politicians and officials but sought to mobilize grassroots public support through letter writing, petitions, and public meetings. Its arguments therefore took hold far away from the corridors of power. The second feature of the Campaign Against Torture is that the history of supporting individual prisoners of conscience meant that the experiences of individual torture survivors were given a prominent place. Perhaps deriving from the presence of broadly progressive and liberal Latin American exiles in Europe and North America, torture survivors were also seen as heroic and principled. The opening pages of the Amnesty International 1973 Report on Torture, for example, begin with first-person narratives detailing the suffering and pain experienced by torture survivors in Turkey, the Soviet Union, and Uruguay, in a style that is familiar from many Amnesty International documents. In this process, individual pain is highlighted as a cause of special horror.
From the early 1970s, medical groups were set up alongside most national Amnesty International sections. They were driven by a worry that doctors were participating in torture in many places around the world (Amnesty International 1977). Furthermore, and perhaps more important, was the need to provide evidence for allegations of torture (see Chapter 3; Amnesty International 1974). Later, attention would also turn to rehabilitation. Initially the focus was on the documentation of physical scars and other marks on bodies, as this was quickest and most practically feasible in contexts where doctors might only have a very short period of time to examine their patients. The Danish medical group, which in the early days was the largest and most influential, also focused on the neurological implications of torture, as many of its leading members were expert in this field. However, the language of psychological trauma also began to play a significant role, perhaps because of the increasing importance of the Latin American anti-torture movement, which was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis (Plotkin 2001). As such, the first publication by Amnesty International on the medical documentation of torture argued that “unquestionably the worst sequelae of torture were psychological and neurological” (1977, 12). In this work there was a profound sense that torture was unique in its levels of suffering, leading one Amnesty International publication to quote Jean Amery’s claim that “torture is the most terrible event remaining in man’s memory” (1973, 58). As such, torture was seen as leaving distinct wounds in the mind.
The third feature of the Amnesty International campaign