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Torturous Journeys: Cruelty, International Law, And Pushbacks And Pullbacks Over The Mediterranean Sea, Jamal Barnes
Torturous Journeys: Cruelty, International Law, And Pushbacks And Pullbacks Over The Mediterranean Sea, Jamal Barnes
Research outputs 2022 to 2026
Boat pushbacks and pullbacks by Italy and the European Union (EU) have returned migrants and refugees to Libya where they have been subjected to brutal human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment. This article argues that these pushbacks and pullbacks not only undermine key human rights principles, but they are also an act of cruelty. As Italy and the EU have used the law to evade their international human rights and refugee obligations, the law has had distributive effects that have shaped migration pathways and exacerbated the vulnerability of migrants and refugees to torture. Not only have legal manoeuvres …
Deterring Torture: The Preventive Power Of Criminal Law And Its Promise For Inhibiting State Abuses, Francesca Laguardia
Deterring Torture: The Preventive Power Of Criminal Law And Its Promise For Inhibiting State Abuses, Francesca Laguardia
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
The use of torture in the War on Terror reinvigorated a longstanding debate about how to prevent such human rights violations, and whether they should be criminalized. Using US history as a case study, this article argues that the criminal sanction is likely to be more successful in preventing such abuses than many other often suggested methods. Analyzing thousands of pages of released government documents as an archive leads to the counterintuitive finding that torturers were often deterred, at least momentarily, by fear of criminal liability, and would have been successfully deterred if not for the lack of prior prosecutions.
Imagining The Unimaginable: Torture And The Criminal Law, Francesca Laguardia
Imagining The Unimaginable: Torture And The Criminal Law, Francesca Laguardia
Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
This article examines the use of torture by the U.S. government in the context of the late 20th-century preventive turn in criminal justice. Challenging the assumption that the use of “enhanced interrogation tactics” in the war on terror was an exceptional deviation from accepted norms, this article suggests that this deviation began decades before the terror attacks, in the context of conventional criminal procedure. I point to the use of the “ticking time bomb hypothetical,” and its connection to criminal procedure’s “kidnapping hypothetical.” Using case law and criminal procedure textbooks I trace the employment of that narrative over several decades, …
Intention, Torture, And The Concept Of State Crime, Aditi Bagchi
Intention, Torture, And The Concept Of State Crime, Aditi Bagchi
All Faculty Scholarship
Notwithstanding the universal prohibition against torture, and almost universal agreement that in order to qualify as torture, the act in question must be committed intentionally with an illicit purpose, the intentional element of torture remains ambiguous. I make the following claims about how we should interpret the intent requirement as applied to states. First, state intent should be understood objectively with reference to the apparent reasons for state action. The subjective motivation of particular state actors is not directly relevant. While we focus on subjective intent in the context of individual crime because of its relation to culpability and blameworthiness, …