TORTURE

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected  a request by 14 men to declare they  were tortured in Ireland by the authority of the British Government. This decision was made with  one judge disagreeing.

The United Nations in 1975 made a Declaration that it is our Human Right not to be subjected to torture, but added, " or to punishment or treatment  that is cruel, inhumane or degrading".

That  addition, helpful though it seems, made it possible for governments to admit they inflicted inhumane and degrading punishment, but to escape being internationally labelled torturers with whatever penalties, if any,  that might bring.  

The British government made use of this , admitting  cruel treatment in Ireland but not  torture. It reminded us of neighbours  who, when faced in court with, say, five  charges  are advised  to plead guilty to the smallest  one - which he or she did not do  -  in the hope of  avoiding a  guilty verdict  on  the larger ones , on which they would probably get a guilty verdict anyway.

 In 1971 a British government spokesperson said there was no torture unless the person who did it took pleasure in doing it. This principle, which seem like something out of a sexual morality pamphlet, enabled people like General Massu in France to say that while he favoured torturing prisoners  in the Algerian war of the nineteen fifties he regretted having to do it, so it was all right  - apart from that he offered little excuse for  his part  in the  military torturing of that war.  He could hardly have pleaded, as present-day governments do, that torture is all right  if it produces results. He and his colleagues succeeded in losing  the war. As torturers tend to do.

In 1997, a group called Christians Against Torture published a Report  in which they included Northern  Ireland under the heading of places where torture was done, even though the examples they quoted were less severe than what was  inflicted on the 14 Irish men whose application for a verdict recognising they were tortured  has been refused for the second time.

So on the one hand governments  have an excuse the UN  left open to them,  on the other  is the clear human belief that torture, as Chambers Dictionary puts it , is " the infliction of severe pain or mental suffering , especially as a punishment or as a means of persuading someone to give information". For the  millions of speakers of the English language that is what torture is - like pushing a prisoner out of a helicopter  - only inches above the ground - knowing that this will cause  unspeakable mental anguish for a prisoner who thinks he or she is about to be smashed to pieces for the family to take care of, if found. For the United Nations torture is one thing, cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment is another. But clearly "cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment" can be , and is,  severe  enough for even  the European Court of Human Rights to call it torture without offending their Grande Chambre up to which we are told  the Irish Government should  bring  the matter now.

Governments nowadays not  only excuse   torture but can publicly support its use in the future - if it produces "results". Sean Mac Bride was right when he called the extension of official torture in the world  an epidemic - that was more than half a century ago.

 As one of the 14 said, the European Community has refused  an opportunity to oppose governmental  torture . To help stop the epidemic.

 Brian Faulkner was the leading politician in Ireland's northeast who insisted on internment without trial in 1971.  The  war in Algeria,  fought  in the nineteen fifties, had provided a pattern of what happens when the military are given control over what would normally be police functions. The military in Algeria took control of police barracks, seized police files many of which were out of date, and acting upon these made many arrests and tortured many of the people arrested . The pattern  in N. Ireland was inevitably similar. Either Mr Faulkner knew what the consequences of his insistence on internment would be in a militarily controlled situation - or he did not. If he knew, then his insistence on internment was even more corrosive than we have ever admitted, insisting on a measure  whose consequences he knew  must  be disastrous. Internment  on military terms  did not mean just putting people in jail without trial or even charge - it meant torture as well for many of them. The Algerian experience was not ancient history, it was during Mr Faulkner's time. If in that case he did not know the consequences of what he insisted on, this  must be  incompetence or cynicism or both.  

The United Nations can at times be too anxious to satisfy some  people's  demands at  other people's expense.

In France  significant public discussion occurred - even among their military - about official French government torture. In 1972 Jules Roy who had begun his career in the military wrote a powerful condemnation of General Massu. Another French general, Bollardiere, condemned their official torturing and  engaged , to his cost,  in public dispute with  Massu about what their government was responsible for. 

There was no comparable dispute or public row in Ireland or Britain. Governments  successfully diverted the  argument, such as it was, away from the suffering of real people being really tortured on to the demands of "national security" and getting "results" and to the false distinction between torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment .

 Which unfortunately is much the same thing.