Where does torture begin and how do we end it?

It’s no secret that humans are capable of doing the most terrible things to each other. Throughout history, people have become victims of cruel treatment in all parts of the world. But when does violence cross the threshold of torture – one of the worst things any human can experience? On 18 January 1978, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a judgment on exactly this question in its case of Ireland vs the United Kingdom.

After having belonged to the United Kingdom (UK) for over a century, in 1922 the island of Ireland split into the Irish Republic as an independent country and Northern Ireland, which continued to belong to the UK but maintained a separate government and parliament. Beginning in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland experienced continuous political and religious instability, involving violence between the unionists who were predominantly protestants and wanted to remain in the UK and the republicans who were predominantly catholics seeking Irish unity. What started as a civil-rights movement protesting discrimination against Catholics soon escalated into large-scale violence involving Irish paramilitaries. The British state security response involved mass arrests and detention of protestors suspected of terrorism.

The case Ireland brought to the European Court of Human Rights concerned alleged wrongdoings of the UK in Northern Ireland, most notably the “five techniques” of interrogation used to deal with 14 prisoners the UK later described as terrorists of the Irish Republican Army. These five interrogation techniques included forcing detainees to remain in a stress position for hours at a time, exposure to continuous loud noise, and deprivation of sleep, food and drink.

The UK justified these measures, claiming normal interrogation methods wouldn’t lead to sufficient evidence in the criminal proceedings against known terrorists who posed a severe threat and aimed at overthrowing the state. The Court found that the five techniques caused “intense physical and mental suffering” and thus amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. This means the actions violated (European) human rights by going against the individuals’ dignity, but the Court went on to say that these techniques were not serious enough to qualify as torture.

Now what does this distinction mean, and why should anyone care about how some lawyers define torture? The acts still constituted human rights violations after all. However, one of the judgment’s implications is that the acts weren’t actually “that bad”, raising the concern that the human rights standards are not high enough if a state can cause intense physical and mental suffering without having to worry about being accused of committing torture. In fact, the US Attorney General cited the Court’s conclusions to prove that the interrogation techniques used by the USA in black sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay did not amount to torture either. But luckily, even the judgments of international courts are not set in stone. The interpretation of treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights evolves over time in accordance with societal changes. What the European Court of Human Rights did not consider torture in 1978 would probably be seen as a clear breach of the prohibition of torture nowadays, almost fifty years later. Ireland vs UK reminds us that human rights law is evolving over time: as survivors, lawyers, journalists, and citizens keep pushing, courts redefine what counts as a violation of human rights, which in turn has an impact on what countries do to protect them.