Several U.N. entities, including the U.N. Committee Against Torture, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and the U.N. subcommittee on prevention of torture, visit places of detention to document when torture happens and urge governments to prevent it. Amnesty International and many other human rights groups publish reports documenting torture and lobby governments to cease its practice.

The U.N. established special tribunals to try perpetrators of torture and other atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and in 2002 it established a permanent International Criminal Court. A host of treatment clinics, both in the United States and throughout the world, provide medical and psychological services to survivors.

But there are few signs that the situation is getting much better. While making an accurate estimate of the number of people tortured in the world is impossible, because torture is illegal and occurs in secret, the best available evidence suggests that torture has decreased over the past two decades, but only slightly.

The United Nations and human rights organizations have tried many strategies to stop torture over the years. At the highest level, human rights organizations have lobbied elected officials in the United States and Europe to put diplomatic pressure on countries that use torture, including withholding trade rights and military aid. At the ground level, human rights workers have given human rights training to police officers, defense attorneys and judges, informing them of their obligations under international law.

It is difficult to say which strategies work best, because there is no good data to work with. Since torture happens in secret, accurately measuring the level of torture before and after an intervention is nearly impossible.

Taking effective action against torture might even cause the number of reported torture incidents to increase, as human rights workers get better at detecting it and the news media does more to publicize it.

Human rights scholars differ in their opinions on what strategies work, or even whether anti-torture strategies work at all. When scholars study individual countries in depth, they often see that interventions by human rights nonprofits have a positive effect. But when comparing many countries statistically over time, scholars often see little effect of anti-torture advocacy.

The act of signing on to the U.N. Convention Against Torture seems to have little effect. Torturing governments may sign the convention as a way of gaining international approval, with no intention of changing their actual practices. This is easy, because the convention has no binding enforcement system and does not require countries to permit independent monitoring. Instead, countries report their own actions.

However, some countries have signed an optional additional part of the convention, which commits them to accepting U.N. monitoring visits. Those countries do seem to reduce their use of torture. While most countries in Europe and Latin America and many in Africa have signed this optional protocol, the United States has not.

Many human rights organizations follow a strategy of “naming and shaming” – documenting and reporting torture in well-researched reports and calling out the countries that allow it to happen.

...continued