United Nations Convention Against Torture

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Hello, my name is Jenifer Johnston and I’m the Communications Manager at the Scottish Human Rights Commission.  Today I’m going to be speaking to the Chair of the Commission, Professor Alan Miller about action that our Commission and others are taking to combat torture. 

JJ:     Alan, I wonder if you could tell us first of all about the United Nations Action, where does it come from, what’s it called and what’s our involvement in it?

AM:     Sure.  The Convention Against Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment is a UN convention that was brought in, in order to make sure that there is proper vigilance to make sure that nobody, anywhere in the world, is subject to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.  So while it was brought in several decades ago, it was realized that it wasn’t as effective as it should be and there was a need to go further, and the extra step that has been taken was to have an optional protocol, an additional part to the convention, agreed by member states at the UN, the UK being one of them that has signed up to it.  And what this does is it requires each state to set up an independent body call a National Preventative Mechanism which would basically monitor the extent to which this UN Convention Against Torture, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment was actually being implemented within that member state and it would make annual reports to the UN Committee Against Torture, based on carrying out inspections of places of detention within the country and it can also invite the UN Committee Against Torture to come and carry out its own investigations where there are areas of concern within the country.

JJ:        And why is the Scottish Human Rights Commission part of this process?

AM:     The Scottish Human Rights Commission is one of the members of this National Preventative Mechanism due to the fact that the Scottish Parliament gave us the power of unlimited access to places of detention in Scotland without the need for any prior notification to the places of detention.  So because we have this power given to us, it was appropriate that we be one of the bodies, part of this UK mechanism.  But our scope actually is a UK scope because it is a UK National Preventative Mechanism, so that even though we will have a specific regard to how the convention is implemented within Scotland, we also will be playing a part at the UK level, for example, it’s likely that we’ll provide training within this mechanism to all the other bodies, Prisons Inspectorates, Police Inspectorates, etcetera, to make sure there’s a consistency of an understanding what is torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, how can it be identified and that therefore, it’s the same approach and standards that are applicable throughout the UK.

JJ:        Alan, if you were to watch the Six O’Clock News, you would think that torture is something that happens in other countries, in other places, why do we need to take action here?

AM:     You don’t often associate torture with Scotland or the UK in terms of what happens inside Scotland or the UK.  So in that respect, torture really comes up more in the sense of issues like extraordinary rendition and the use of Scottish or UK airports for the purposes of extraordinary rendition or it might arguably come up in the use of military bases, controlled by the UK elsewhere in the world, where there have been allegations of torture.  Moving then to the sort of more everyday experience within Scotland and within the United Kingdom, it’s probably less torture and more falling into what’s inhuman and degrading treatment and this relates not only to prisons where there have been cases brought to the courts and inhuman and degrading treatment has been found by the courts because of the regimes and some practices that operate within some of the prisons, but also in more common place settings.  If you have, for example, a case that went from Scotland to the European Court of Human Rights, where it was found that children in a family had been abused over the years by their step-father and that the local authority had neglected to properly look after these children, then that was considered they had suffered inhuman and degrading treatment as a result of the failure of the local authority to properly protect them from abuse within their own home.  So there are also concerns about the standards of care in a lot of care settings, either in residential care where there’s been a lot of reports recently in the media about the standards of care for older persons that falls below acceptable standards.  They may suffer a combination of inadequate health care, inadequate nutrition, inadequate association with their fellow residents or visitations from family members and putting all these together, that can amount to inhuman and degrading treatment.  Or if someone’s not in a residential home and are just living alone in their own home, but in isolation and not receiving the sort of support that they’re entitled to, then they may be left in such a state of virtual destitution and neglect that, that also could constitute inhuman and degrading treatment.  So it’s maybe much broader in its application than we might at first thing just looking at the words by themselves.

JJ:        And finally, what practical effect will signing up to this protocol have in Scotland?

AM:     Those organisations that make up this body are the existing inspectorates.  It’s the Care Commission, it’s the Police Inspectorate, it’s the Prisons Inspectorate, the Mental Welfare Commission, so that the effect of this body and the optional protocol should be to increase the capability of all of these existing inspectorates to better identify what are the cultures like within these institutions that they are inspecting on a daily basis and maybe to look at it through different eyes than they have before and being much more conscious of the rights of individuals not to be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment and seeing the telltale signs that this may be what is actually going on in these institutions.