Torture represents a direct attack on the essence of human dignity.
Its mere mention evokes a prolific and sordid history: Europe in
the Middle Ages, with beds of nails, witch hunts, and burnings; the
brutal methods used by military dictatorships against political
dissidents in 1970s Latin America; and the gruesome photographs
from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other Bush-era places of
detention. While leaders in the West had once hoped that torture
would disappear by the end of the twentieth century-and that our
children would read about this unfathomable practice in history
books and not in the daily papers-research indicates that torture
is still routinely used in the majority of twenty-first-century
nations. In his six years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on Torture, Manfred Nowak was tasked with reviewing thousands of
complaints of torture and detention, investigating facts and
circumstances surrounding the global practice of torture, and
drawing up recommendations aimed at combating torture. Now, in
Torture, readers can get a firsthand glimpse of how modern-day
torture is investigated and understood by those working on the
frontlines of researching, addressing, and preventing it. Nowak
recounts his experience visiting countries, reviewing documents,
collecting evidence, and conducting interviews with perpetrators,
witnesses, and victims of torture. He offers vignettes of the many
states he visited, comparing their diverse experiences, and he
explores the rise of new twenty-first-century practices of torture,
questioning whether capital punishment, corporal punishment,
solitary confinement, and contemporary forms of slavery qualify as
torture. Ultimately, Torture offers vital insights for human-rights
scholars and professionals as it tries to make the unfathomable
more comprehensible and to clarify the causes and dynamics of
torture.
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