AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Fall/Winter 2004 Vol XXIV, No. 2

Understanding and Eliminating Torture: A New Science and Human Rights Project

Audrey Chapman

Although academic researchers and civil society organizations have made great strides in the past several decades documenting and exposing the practice of torture around the world, the factors related to the occurrence of torture in different types of societies and the kinds of interventions that might reduce the incidence of torture are still poorly understood. To date there have been no major scientific studies of the factors influencing whether torture is likely to occur or the implications of the use of torture for the wider society. Nor is there systematic research evaluating the effectiveness of various types of interventions both by state actors and by civil society actors to prevent torture or at least to reduce its incidence. The Science and Human Rights Program is initiating a multi-dimensional project is to contribute to this knowledge.

Some of the specific issues the project will address are the following:

• why the incidence of torture is significantly higher in some societies than others;
  
  
• why do democratic governments sometimes sanction the application of torture or allow it to take place;
  
  
• does torture generally occur because of the actions of a few “bad eggs,” as it is often claimed, or is it more likely to be the outcome of policies and the nature of institutions;
  
  
• what types of institutional measures and preventative interventions are most effective in preventing torture respectively in authoritarian, democratic and transitional societies;
  
  
• what are the social, psychological, and political implications of governments sanctioning the use of torture for the wider society, particularly for democratic governments.
  

In the development phase of the project, we plan to collect information on torture violations from four major sources - Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department Country Reports, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Committee against Torture - in order to assess the quality of the data and to consider the methodological issues involved in integrating the sources into a comprehensive database. We will also evaluate the feasibility of creating a parallel country database of structural factors related to the prevention of torture, including relevant laws and constitutional provisions, judicial oversight mechanisms, and institutional oversight and monitoring of torture using the four sources, and supplemented by the reports of the UN Special Rapporteur Against Torture and the UN Human Rights Committee.

In the second phase of the project we will expand the effort from the development phase to create two databases, one on torture practices and the other on interventions. Our goal is to include all countries for which data are available for the period from 1976 to 2004.

In subsequent phases, we will then use the global databases to analyze diverse causal explanations for torture as well as the effectiveness of different interventions (specifically related to the degree of system openness and tolerance of dissent, the commitment to various types of human rights, the relative freedom of press, the use of preventive detention measures, the strength of various types of civil society and professional organizations, the existence of an independent judiciary, and cultural/geographic variation).

We also plan to undertake a meta-analysis of the literature related to societal violence, torture practices, and the treatment of torture victims from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The analysis will include relevant studies in the fields of transitional justice research, perpetrator studies, law, criminology, psychology, medicine, and sociology so as to ascertain what we know and don’t know about these issues.