The Counterargument:
Although the prevalence and the arguable effectiveness of torture may seem to justify its use, legalizing torture would violate the humanitarian principles that underlie international bans against torture.
International bans against torture are written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Geneva Conventions of the following year, which protect prisoners of war, and the 1984 Convention Against Torture. A majority of countries have now signed all of the accords that ban even so-called lesser forms of torture such as sleep deprivation. Many human-rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, unequivocally condemn torture, and a great number of organizations are set up to specifically help victims of torture suffering from trauma and related conditions. The near-universal ban of torture also rejects confessions coerced by torture as unreliable evidence, as written in Article 15 of the 1984 Convention Against Torture.
Experts also warn that legalizing torture could lead to the breakdown of democratic values.
Making torture a legal option, they assert, would inevitably lead to the expansion of the power to torture as the number of accused and the pressures of crises mount. Reed College political science professor Darius Rejali provides the example of a 15-month period between 1956 and 1957 during the French counterinsurgency in Algiers, in which French judges issued interrogators an increasing number of torture warrants every month. Twenty-four thousand were apparently issued in total at the end of that period. Legalizing torture where there is no time for legal procedure would also breach the democratic right to due process granted to every suspect. To torture a suspected terrorist about an imminent threat necessitates that torture be administered based on suspicion and not on legal proof.
These laws and organizations also reject torture because it follows the logic of terrorists.
Terrorists act on the principle that the ends justify the means, believing that harming innocent people is justified to reach their religious or political goal. 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.
Having considered both sides of the debate about torture, do you still believe that it should be legalized for use in certain crisis situations?>>
