SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The book analyses the nature, significance, and implications of the transformation of the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in international law. It demonstrates how this fundamental human rights norm has withstood challenges in the ‘war on terror’, albeit with ambivalent outcomes. In parallel, multidisciplinary scholarship, practice in the field, and jurisprudence have developed the conceptual understanding of torture and other ill-treatment, including their link with discrimination, and innovative approaches to prevention, accountability, and reparation. The prohibition has also benefited from cross-fertilization in its interaction with international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international migration law, although not without facing challenges in terms of its interpretation and application. The book sets out a relational understanding of torture and other ill-treatment that locates them in wider power structures. It identifies the tensions and dialectics inherent in the prohibition between its conventional focus on extreme forms of state violence and broader, evolving understandings. Applying the prohibition to key twenty-first century challenges, particularly in respect of health, poverty, and climate change, the book argues that the prohibition plays a critical role in highlighting and addressing widespread, intolerable structural pain and suffering through an integrated human rights approach with a distinctive transformative focus and dimension. This includes interrogating the role of international law, and the international order more widely, in facilitating, legitimizing, and obscuring systemic suffering and degradation through legal concepts such as sovereignty, punitive social control, and detrimental economic policies.