How do you torture people

Officials, including the police, prey on all these people in secret and without fear of punishment. Torture is linked to corruption, to the reliance on forced confessions, and to authoritarian governments instilling fear to entrench their power. The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines the perpetrators as people in an official capacity.

Article 1 states:. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. Since then, the UN Committee Against Torture and regional human rights courts have interpreted this definition, by finding that a State is responsible for acts committed by individuals acting in a private capacity, if the State fails to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish such acts.

This is for example the case when the authorities refuse to prosecute a private individual who has inflicted severe harm, including rape, on a woman. In such a situation, the State is complicit or otherwise responsible for consenting or acquiescing to the violence.

Who we are What is torture? Who are the torturers? Governance Team Offices Careers Navigate. Governance Team Offices Careers. The records of trials conducted throughout Europe in the 16th and the 17th century testify to the numerous tragic verdicts reached on the basis of confessions extorted by excruciating methods of torture. Many of those trials ended with capital punishments. The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century brought changes to all processes of society, including legal science.

As well as by the Enlightenment ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu, changes to trial procedures were also influenced by the work of Cesare Beccaria, Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher and politician. His treatise On Crimes and Punishments marks the beginning of modern criminal law. Advocating the principle of respect for the human rights of the accused, Beccaria in his treatises argues for public trials and opposes torture and the death penalty.

He believes that the criminal justice system should aim at the prevention of crime instead of punishment and that the improvement of living conditions would lead to decline in crime. Prussia was the first country to abolish torture in , followed by Austria in and France in At the beginning of the 19th century, European legislation no longer used torture as a legal instrument in trial procedures. Unfortunately, this was short lived.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with national socialist and revolutionary ideas, human and civil rights were pushed out by the rights of nations and the revolution. Secret civil and military police forces largely contributed to the use of torture, having tortured political dissidents, spies and prisoners of war. International human rights and humanitarian organisations began to react to this systematic and unrestricted use of repression.

In the inquisitorial procedure a judge or a group of judges actively investigate the case, in order to declare the verdict and decide on the potential penalty. The accused could be convicted only if he acknowledged his guilt in the presence of two honourable witnesses.

They denounced countries all around the world for the tremendous sufferings inflicted on civilians and the devastation caused by war and called upon them to return to the ethical principles of the Enlightenment period and to the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of These efforts resulted in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the un in , extremely important for the condemnation of torture.

A number of acts for the protection of human rights were adopted at the initiative of the Council of Europe; the most significant among them is the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, adopted in Rome in International non-governmental organisations for protection of human rights, including Amnesty International, contributed with their work to the creation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment commonly known as the United Nations Convention against Torture , adopted by the un General Assembly in Most people assume that torturing another human being is something only a minority are capable of doing.

Waterboarding requires the use of physical restraints — perhaps only after a physical struggle — unless the captive willingly submits to the process. Slapping or hitting another person, imposing extremes of temperature, electrocuting them, requires active others who must grapple with, and perhaps subdue, the captive, imposing levels of physical contact that violate all norms of interpersonal interaction.

Torturing someone is not easy, and subjecting a fellow human being to torture is stressful for all but the most psychopathic. Once removed from the theatre of war and the camaraderie of the battalion, intense, enduring and disabling guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse follow. Suicide is not uncommon. What would it take for an ordinary person to torture someone else — perhaps electrocute them, even to the point of apparent death? In possibly the most famous experiments in social psychology, the late Stanley Milgram of Yale University investigated the conditions under which ordinary people would be willing to obey instructions from an authority figure to electrocute another person.

The story of these experiments has often been told, but it is worth describing them again because they continue, more than 40 years on and many successful replications later, to retain their capacity to shock the conscience and illustrate how humans will bend to the demands of authority. Milgram invited members of the public by advertisement to come to his laboratory to investigate the effects of punishment on learning and memory.

Subjects were introduced to another participant and told this person was going to be electrocuted whenever they misremembered words they were meant to learn. This other person — in fact, an actor who did not actually experience any pain or discomfort — was brought to a room and hooked up to what looked like a set of electric shock pads.

The actor was in communication via a two-way speaker with the subject, who was seated in a second room in front of a large box featuring a dial said to be capable of delivering electric shocks from 0 to volts. At various points around the dials, different dangers associated with particular shock levels were indicated. The experimenter the authority figure was a scientist in a white coat, who gave instructions to the unwitting subject; that individual would apply the electric shock whenever the actor made an error, and the apparent distress of the actor would increase as the shock level increased.

At the start of these experiments, Milgram had his experimental protocols reviewed. It was generally concluded that the vast majority of people would not go anywhere near the highest levels of shock: that they would desist from shocking the actor long before the maximum point on the dial was reached.

However, Milgram found that about two-thirds of test participants progressed all the way to the maximum shock. What is the lesson to be drawn from these experiments? There have been 18 successful replications of his original study between and , and several more recent replications, with a host of different variables worth examining in detail.

Yet several results stand out: participants reported less anxiety and distress when the learner was of North African origin. And participants who exhibited higher levels of right-wing authoritarianism and who showed higher levels of anger were more likely to show high levels of obedience as well. There was 81 per cent obedience in the standard condition, but only 28 per cent obedience in the host-withdrawal condition.

The team further found two personality constructs moderately associated with obedience: agreeableness and conscientiousness. These are dispositions that might indeed be necessary for willing or unwilling participation in a programme of coercive interrogation or torture. Of course, rebels are not usually selected by institutions to operate sensitive programmes: Edward Snowden is the exception, not the rule.

People can override their moral compass when an authority figure is present and institutional circumstances demand it. Again, remarkable effects on behaviour were observed. Those designated prison guards became, in many cases, very authoritarian, and their prisoners became passive. The experiment, which was supposed to last two weeks, had to be terminated after six days. The prison guards became abusive in certain instances, and began using wooden batons as symbols of status.

They adopted mirrored sunglasses and clothing that simulated the clothes of a prison guard. The prisoners, by contrast, were fitted in prison clothing, called by their numbers not their names, and wore ankle chains. Guards became sadistic in about one-third of cases.

They harassed the prisoners, imposed protracted exercise as punishments on them, refused to allow them access to toilets, and would remove their mattresses. These prisoners were, until a few days previously, fellow students and not guilty of any criminal offence.

The scenario gave rise to what Zimbardo referred to as deindividualisation, in which people might define themselves with respect to their roles, not to themselves or their ethical standards as persons. These experiments emphasise the importance of institutional context as a driver for individual behaviour, and the extent to which an institutional context can cause people to override their individual and normal predispositions.

Such views might suggest that people have an internal moral compass and a set of moral attitudes, and that these will drive behaviour, almost irrespective of circumstance. The emerging position, however, is much more complex.

Individuals might have their own moral compass, but they are capable of overriding it and inflicting severe punishments on others when an authority figure is present and institutional circumstances demand it. Why is this? Humans are empathic beings. With certain exceptions, we are capable of simulating the internal states that other humans experience; imposing pain or stress on another human comes with a psychological cost to ourselves.

Those of us who are not psychopaths, have not been deindividuated, and are not acting on the instructions of a higher authority do, indeed, have a substantial capacity for sharing the experiences of another person — for empathy. Over the past 15 to 20 years, neuroscientists have made substantial strides in understanding the brain systems that are involved in empathy.

What is the difference, for example, between experiencing pain yourself and watching pain in another human? What happens in our brains when we see another in pain or distress, especially somebody with whom we have a close relationship? In what has to be one of the most remarkable findings in brain imaging, it has now been shown repeatedly that when we see another person in pain, we experience activations in our pain matrix that correspond to the activations that would occur if we were experiencing the same painful stimuli without the sensory input and motor output, because we have not directly experienced an assault to the surface of the body.

This core response accounts for the sudden wincing shock and stress we feel when we see someone sustain an injury.