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TITLE OF PAPER: Torture in International Human Rights Law

Author:
Name: Mukhtar Ahmad

Designation: B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) 2nd year

University: Aligarh Muslim University Murshidabad Centre

Contact: +91 8617049816

Email: mukhtarahmad337@gmail.com

Co-Author 1:

Name: Mohd Yusuf

Designation: B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) 2nd year

University: Aligarh Muslim University Murshidabad Centre

Contact: +91 8388828416/9582988335

Email: yusufkhan.gorakhpur@gmail.com

Co-Author 2:

Name: Wafa Sarwar

Designation: B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) 1st year

University: Aligarh Muslim University Murshidabad Centre

Contact: +91 7463874886

Email: wafa.sarwar94312@gmail.com

Address for Correspondence: 05, Boys Hostel Aligarh Muslim University Murshidabad

Centre, Ahiran Barrage 742223 Murshidabad, West Bengal

 TORTURE IN INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

Abstract: There is a universal consensus in the international community that torture and other
forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment or treatment cannot be reconciled with a
global order fundamentally committed to basic respect and human dignity. Torture assails the
essential physical and psychological integrity of a human being. Hence it is not surprising that
torture is prohibited by international, regional, and national law. However, the practice of state
craft proves that there exists an operational code that accepts and sometimes, advertently or
inadvertently, supports the torturer. It may go further and seek to immunize the torturer from
any sense of responsibility for torture-conditioned conduct. Amnesty International's Annual
Report of 1999 provides the following statistics relating to torture and ill-treatment: in the sub-
Saharan African region, some thirty-three countries provide evidence of torture or ill-treatment
by state operatives, and twenty countries are implicated in deaths attributable to torture, ill-
treatment, or negligence through inhuman and degrading prison conditions. Universal
Declaration of Human Rights Article 5 states: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." This ban on torture and other ill-treatment
has subsequently been incorporated into the extensive network of international and regional
human rights treaties. Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bans "violence of life and person,
in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" as well as "outrages
upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." In order to uncover
completely and begin to attack the problem of torture it is important that the issue became a
higher priority within the international community. It is no longer a matter of developing
international instruments of universal prescriptive force. The international community must
now give the existing laws proscribing torture full procedural efficacy. It is generally
recognized today that modern human rights law evolved in response to the atrocities committed
during the Second World War and to the effort to provide a moral as well as judicial reckoning
and understanding of the legacy of that conflict. The creation of the U.N. Charter in 1945
represented an effort to specifically prescribe certain obligations on states.

Keywords: Degrading Treatment, State Operatives, Human Dignity, Psychic Condition,

Universal Consensus.