Psyche, Science, and Society

UN Human Rights Commissioner: Waterboarding is torture; should be prosecuted

February 9th, 2008

As the Bush administration lauds it’s use of waterboarding, and the Attorney General says it’s legal, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reminds us that waterboarding is torture and is subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning it can be prosecuted anywhere in the world. Alas, no country has the nerve to stand up to the U.S. torture regime. Only U.S. citizens can restore the rule of law.

Waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture - UN

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding and used by the United States qualifies as torture, the U.N. human rights chief said Friday.

“I would have no problems with describing this practice as falling under the prohibition of torture,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told a news conference in Mexico City.

Arbour made her comment in response to a question about whether U.S. officials could be tried for the use of waterboarding that referred to CIA director Michael Hayden telling Congress Tuesday his agency had used waterboarding on three detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’ which allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations, Arbour said.

“There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction … to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress,” Arbour said.

The U.S. Congress is considering banning the practice, in which prisoners are immobilized and water is poured into their breathing passages to simulate drowning.

Arbour referred to an arrest warrant issued in 1998 by a Spanish judge for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died in 2006, on charges of torture, murder and kidnapping in the years that followed his 1973 coup.

Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s were known to use waterboarding on political prisoners.

Entry Filed under: Bush administration, Human Rights, International Law, Interrogation, Rights and Liberties, Torture, War Crimes