News & Stories

Conceptions of Justice Affect Enforcement of Human Rights

Posted Oct 20 2013

Why do liberal democracies with strong judiciaries use torture? Why do states endorse norms such as the Convention Against Torture but then interpret them in ways that undermine their purpose?

These were some of the questions raised by Rachel Wahl, a visiting scholar at Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, during a recent talk at SIPA entitled “Protecting Rights by Violating Them.” Jack Snyder, a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science, moderated the discussion.

The Convention Against Torture embodies values that are widely shared across the world. Yet it is commonly violated by states that have ratified the Convention (like the United States). These violations are often understood to be due to various interests of the states. But Wahl suggested there may be other factors that are not necessarily rooted at the institutional level.

Wahl spent 12 months researching law enforcement in India and found some clues that could explain the gap between a formal endorsement and implementation of a norm such as the right to be protected from torture.

Her interviews with individuals who were actually responsible for upholding norms — police and military officers —  revealed that their conceptions of justice conflicted with the human rights framework they had studied in a course.

The human rights framework attempts to advocate for universal human dignity, but Wahl said many officers expressed their belief that “those who violate others’ rights don’t deserve protection of their rights.”

This played an important role in how they understood and explained the use of torture, she said.

Still, the law enforcement officers did often differentiate between what they considered to be right and wrong forms of torture. They said torture motivated by peer pressure or self-interest, such as bribes, is wrong; torture they could understand as being for the public good and serving a purpose is believed to be right.

Wahl explained how, through her interviewees’ reasoning, the human rights of some will be violated in order to maintain law and order.

But she also added that the officers in India said the inefficiency and corruption in political and legal systems further led them to believe they must sometimes act outside of law, regarding torture or violence. Their work in maintaining security, they explained, was incompatible with rights protection as defined in a treaty like the Convention Against Torture.

Wahl stressed that the police officers she interviewed accepted and understood the human rights principle embodied in international law. The officers admitted using violence and torture, but not because of lack of training. They simply rationalized that “different things are necessary” to carry out their jobs.

The discussion ended with the suggestion that human rights education and human rights activism, which were one and the same thing for the officers that Wahl interviewed, should be separated. While the education component must work with the police, activism should pressure their practice from the outside.

— Doyeun Kim MIA ’14