Torture

Book Review: “Beyond the Usual Beating”

Review Editors HUQUQ Bookreview Torture 0

Andrew S. Baer’s Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements for Police Accountability in Chicago is a beautifully crafted and deeply disturbing account that offers raw insight into the covert activities of the notorious Areas 2 and 3 of the Chicago Police Department. Baer documents how white detectives, led by Jon Burge, routinely used inhumane and militarized torture strategies such as electrocution, suffocation, and beatings to extract confessions from Black suspects. The scandal’s horror lies not just in the brutality itself, but in how the entire criminal justice system sustained and protected it. Supervisors, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges were aware of the torture yet remained silent because coerced confessions helped close cases. Baer roots these acts in a long history of racial bias, showing how detectives’ upbringing, experiences, and prejudices shaped a system that treated Black suspects as disposable. Baer structures the book into six chapters, grouped into two parts. Part I traces the roots of the torture regime, both biographically and institutionally. The first chapter details Jon Burge’s (Burge) childhood in Chicago, his deployment to Vietnam, and how both his personal history and a generational backlash against deindustrialization, racial transition, and crime shaped his worldview. By the time Burge returned from Vietnam, where he likely witnessed or participated in prisoner abuse, the lines between military and policing tactics were already blurred. Chapter two shows how Burge’s personal biases were institutionalized. Joining the Chicago Police Department in 1970 and promoted to detective by […]

On the Release of Political Prisoners in Syria and Human Rights

HUQUQ Editors Comments on Rights Political Prisoners, Torture 0

There are good reasons for cheering the freeing of political prisoners held in Syria after the fall of the Baath rule. Indeed, no one should be imprisoned for political expression or for belonging to a political trend that disagrees with the ruling party. Therefore, probing evidence of torture and holding those responsible should be the most urgent action, but it must be done independently and transparently. The collapsed Syrian government, like all other governments around the world, created a “label” for social groups it wants to target, legislate a law that criminalize the “label”, and use the law to justify all its abuses. In the last 24 years alone, the Syrian government attached the label “terrorism” to all groups that have opposed its rule, and in many cases, even to those who called for political reform, and used the designation to justify exclusion, imprisonment, and torture of political opponents. The swift and relatively “peaceful” collapse of the Baath government this time, spared the Syrian people much death and destruction that they are all very familiar with. However, the political change is rooted in extreme violence that persisted for more than 14 years, a time during which all armed entities committed human rights abuses. It is unlikely that human rights abuses will end with the fall of Baath government. Earlier this year, for weeks, Syrians in Idlib took to the streets to protest the rule and practices of some of the groups that governed northwest Syrian. From March to May (2024), […]

Torture and Islamic Law

Research Assistants Essays, Jurisprudence Torture 0

Abstract This article considers the relationship between Islamic law and the absence or practice of investigative torture in the countries of today’s Muslim world. Torture is forbidden in the constitutions, statutes, and treaties of most Muslim-majority countries, but a number of these countries are regularly named among those in which torture is practiced with apparent impunity. Among these countries are several that profess a commitment to Islamic law as a source of national law, including some that identify Islamic law as the principal source of law and some that go so far as to declare themselves “Islamic states.” The status of investigative torture in Islamic law has long been unsettled: most early classical jurists forbade it, but some later classical jurists permitted it in at least certain circumstances. The permission some jurists gave the practice in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) was matched and augmented by a broader license jurists gave executive actors in the realm of governance or administration (siyasa), a realm seen as necessarily less constrained by jurisprudential limitations. Historical evidence indicates that investigative torture was indeed practiced by executive actors at various periods and places of the pre-modern Muslim world. Nevertheless, statistical analysis indicates little or no correlation between the absence or practice of torture in today’s Muslim-majority countries and the degree of commitment these countries profess to Islamic law. Instead, this article concludes, the absence or practice of torture in a given Muslim-majority country today (and the willingness of Muslim-majority countries to join international covenants that ban torture) […]

Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Editorial Team Treaties Torture 0

Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984 entry into force 26 June 1987, in accordance with article 27 (1) The States Parties to this Convention, Considering that, in accordance with the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Recognizing that those rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person, Considering the obligation of States under the Charter, in particular Article 55, to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms, Having regard to article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which provide that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Having regard also to the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1975, Desiring to make more effective the struggle against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment throughout the world, Have agreed as follows: PART I Article 1 1. 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 […]