The imposition and execution of the death penalty are not per se violations of general international law and thus may amount to lawful sanctions in certain circumstances. This is so, even though the global trend towards the ending of capital punishment continues. As of August 2024, 53 States retained the death penalty for ordinary criminal offences. This chapter discusses the legality of capital punishment and its different forms. Certain categories of person may never be executed.

Outlawing all forms of ill-treatment can only be achieved by effective investigation and prosecution of the offenders. This chapter considers the duty to investigate both torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment. Where any ill-treatment is credibly alleged, a State is obligated by treaty and/or customary law to investigate. Where criminal wrongdoing amounting to torture or other ill-treatment is identified in the course of an impartial investigation, the perpetrators must be prosecuted and, if convicted at the end of a fair trial, duly punished. In practice, even when the crime is on the statute book in any given domestic legal regime and the various elements of the offence pertain to any individual, it is very rare for the specific charge of torture to be laid. More often, when a prosecution is mounted, for instance against a police officer or other law enforcement official alleged to have ill-treated a suspect, detainee, or other person, assault—not torture—is the charge on which the accused is indicted.

A victim is most obviously under the effective control of another where he or she has been formally deprived of liberty by the State and the perpetrator is a legal custodian. But a state of powerlessness may also arise in an extra-custodial law enforcement setting in certain circumstances. This chapter explores that dynamic, addressing the regulation of unlawful extra-custodial use of force by the police and other law enforcement officials, first as a manifestation of torture and then, in the more common alternative, as other proscribed ill-treatment.

The distinct prohibitions of torture and other forms of ill-treatment have crystallized as customary international law as the chapter discusses. In the specific case of torture, its prohibition is also a peremptory (jus cogens) norm of international law – a rule that is applicable in all circumstances and in any place. The chapter also discusses the geographical, material, personal, and temporal jurisdiction of the prohibitions of torture and other ill-treatment under international law more generally.

This chapter discusses the specifics of unlawful treatment of a detainee in peacetime; that is to say, outside the material jurisdiction of armed conflict. This concerns the conduct of any relevant law enforcement official, including a border force official or member of the security forces such as the gendarmerie, but is most commonly an issue involving the police or the prison service. First considered is the protection of persons in police custody. The protection of the 11.5 million people believed to be held in any form of prison across the world is then addressed. Separate sections are dedicated to incarcerated women and children, before a final section reviews some of the particular issues that arise in detention facilities managed by the private sector.

This chapter discusses how torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment (‘other ill-treatment’) applies to the treatment of members of any armed force. Life in the military can be brutal even without a recruit ever facing the enemy in combat. Many armed forces or non-State armed groups have initiation rites that often involve degrading, and sometimes inhuman treatment. Once incorporated into any armed force (whether State or non-State), recruits may suffer intermittent or regular beatings at the hands of other soldiers or their commanders. This may be a form of sanction for poor performance but it may also be part and parcel of their existence in the military. Positions of authority in any armed force offer an opportunity to engage in gratuitous, unlawful violence – typically without the fear of ever being held accountable. Recruits—male as well as female—may be subjected to sexual violence or even raped. Children, who continue to be recruited into some armed forces and many non-State armed groups (often by force), are especially vulnerable to abuse and harm.

The prohibitions of torture and other ill-treatment in armed conflict under international humanitarian law largely reflect the prohibitions under human rights law, but there are also a number of important distinctions. Most obviously, the requirement for the involvement in some manner of a public official does not apply in the case of a non-State armed group that is party to a non-international armed conflict. But international criminal tribunals have also, on certain occasion, interpreted the prohibitions in a manner that does not accurately reflect international law. This chapter summarizes the classification of armed conflict under IHL. It then looks at how the two different classification of armed conflict (international and non-international) prohibit different forms of ill-treatment. The third main section of the chapter discusses the perpetration of these different forms of ill-treatment in selected conflicts going back to the start of the millennium, covering the conduct of Russia (in Ukraine), Syria (especially since 2012), Thailand (in the armed conflict in the south), and the United States (in particular at Guantánamo Bay since 2002).

Torture committed in the context of and in direct connection with any armed conflict is beyond doubt a war crime under customary international law. Torture that is committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population within or outside armed conflict, with knowledge of the attack, is a crime against humanity. Torture is not explicitly an act of genocide when committed with the specific intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Nevertheless, in a landmark judgment, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held torture formed part of the predicate offence of causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of one of the four protected groups.

Chapter 6 focuses on the men who were caught in the act of trying to start the intended rebellion. They were all free people of African descent, yet some among them also invited enslaved people to join the rebellion. Thus, relations between enslaved and free people are at the center of this chapter. The ways in which these people talked about freedom and bondage with one another presents a picture in which it is impossible to say that the conspiracy was definitively anti- or pro-slavery. There were some men who took abolition of slavery quite seriously, and there were others who had no interest in the matter whatsoever. Those who fit the latter group were connected to a shadowy group of elite white men who had been planning their own rebellion. Evidence of these white men’s participation in a conspiracy showed up frequently during a significant number of different men’s interrogations. The High Court chose to ignore or dismiss all such claims, clearing the way for them to transform the collective insurgencies of 1798 into a so-called Pardo conspiracy, free from confusion, free from uneven relations, and unconnected to the aims of elite white men.

Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

This chapter begins with the history of the international recognition of terrorism as a crime, including through the adoption of global and regional counter-terrorism treaties, and United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions. The chapter then turns to a discussion of the challenges associated with defining terrorism, including its material and mental elements, and with national prosecutions. The chapter also explores terrorism as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and a crime under customary international law. The chapter’s consideration of torture begins with the definition found in the UN Convention Against Torture, and considers the obligation to prosecute or extradite (aut dedere aut judicare) under that treaty. It also discusses torture as an international crime under the ICC Statute and other statutes of international criminal tribunals. The chapter ends with an examination of ecocide as an emerging crime.

The significance of emotions is often implicitly addressed in norm research. Some International Relations (IR) scholars, for example, suggest a regulatory function of emotions when it comes to norm-based behaviour, norm compliance, norm persuasion, and norm contestation. Yet, the literature on norms often takes these affective dynamics for granted without making them explicit. This contribution seeks to address this imbalance by examining the relationship between emotions (as moral value judgements) and norms (as collective expectations about appropriate behaviour). Specifically, we extend the current analytical focus by proposing a framework for the empirical investigation of emotional resonance in norm research. We argue that emotional resonance is crucial to the impact and enforcement of international norms because emotions assign specific value to norms within normative orders. We identify pathways and build bridges between norm research and research on emotions in IR and develop a theoretical model to show how emotional resonance is helpful for explaining failures of norm compliance. The way in which the absence of emotional resonance facilitates non-compliance is illustrated by the example of the Bush administration’s reaction to torture allegations in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Under what conditions can we expect international courts to be progressive? The introduction begins with a discussion of why it is compelling to answer this question by looking at the case of the European Court of Human Rights – a court that is not unambiguously progressive. It then lays out the theoretical and empirical foundations of the book, presenting the key concepts of forbearance and audacity – strategies that courts employ to adjust their sovereignty costs while maintaining a good institutional reputation. The theoretical framework explains why the Court needs to oscillate between forbearance and audacity, and how this oscillation has shaped the norm against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. The empirical analysis, in its turn, combines social science methods and legal analysis to reveal the extent to which the Court has resorted to forbearance and audacity when interpreting the norm against torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, and how such episodes influenced the norm’s developmental trajectory. The introduction concludes by explaining the determinants of forbearance and audacity and putting forth the book’s key contributions to the existing debates.

Chapter 6 examines the ways in which reformers and certain colonial agents were engaging with deindustrialization as an anomalous societal calamity. Many believed that prejudicial tariffs had resulted in the country’s exclusion from a system of “real” free trade, which in turn contributed to the near-collapse of the native handloom-weaving sector. Following initiatives first devised by the Bombay administration – which the Government of India quickly overruled – reformers hoped to stimulate alternative industries such as the cultivation and refinement of free-labor sugarcane. To provide immiserated weavers with agricultural employment on “fair” terms, they further advocated for radical tax reductions, challenged the state’s claim to be sole proprietor of all Indian lands, and publicly revealed its torturous revenue extraction practices. Reformers thereby held that mass poverty in a land as fecund as India could only be the result of European avarice and artificial constraints that inhibited trade.