Your Choice
You don't believe that torture should be legalized, even if it may help extract crucial information from the suspect.
Your choice conforms with international laws which prohibit torture under any circumstance. According to such standards—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Geneva Conventions of the following year that protect prisoners of war, and the 1984 Convention Against Torture—torture violates basic humanitarian principles.
Human-rights groups also unequivocally condemn torture, and there are a great number of organizations in place specifically to help victims of torture suffering from trauma and related conditions. Many believe that torture dehumanizes not only the individual who is tortured but also the broader society which allows it. In addition, confession extracted under coercion is often dismissed as unreliable, even tainted. Article 15 of the 1984 Convention Against Torture specifically forbids testimony gathered from torture to be used in court.
These laws and organizations also reject torture because it seems to follow the logic of terrorists—that the ends justify the means—rather than democratic principles. Terrorists believe harming innocent people is justified to reach a religious or political goal, and many experts argue that torturing suspects to extract information that could prevent a terrorist attack falls into the same kind of ends-and-means logic.
To torture a suspected terrorist in a ticking-time-bomb case necessitates that torture be administered solely on the basis of suspicion and not on legal proof. This violates the democratic guarantee of due process. Experts also warn that legalizing torture would inevitably lead to the expansion of the power to torture as accusations and crises mount, eventually leading to a breakdown of democratic values.
Your choice to prohibit torture in all circumstances is in keeping with humanitarian principles. Before you commit to this choice, you might consider the arguments in favor of legalizing torture.
Read on to learn about the counterarguments that advocate legalizing and regulating torture.>>
