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United Nations Convention Against Torture

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, for raising this important debate tonight. I hesitated in putting my name forward for the debate, since I am no expert in this matter. The issues I want to discuss may be rather obvious ones. I am moved to speak because as a young psychiatrist in the 1980s, I heard at first hand the stories of refugees tortured under the Pinochet regime in Chile; stories of horror that were etched on my dreams for months and will never be forgotten. Torture is not just a painful, frightening and degrading episode. The consequences last many years; the depression, fear, loss of self-worth and even more serious psychiatric consequences for victims often last lifelong. This has been so often said by the Medical Foundation for Torture Victims, whose work I want to praise. It has done so much valuable work to restore broken bodies and minds. In order to carry out torture, the perpetrators have to be trained to believe that the objects of their torture are less than human, not like us, unworthy to be treated as members of the human race. We know how frighteningly easy it is to create the conditions in which people feel like that about others. I have known good people—nurses—to do the most barbaric acts to patients under the right circumstances—or the wrong circumstances. I know how easy it is to slip down that slippery slope. I shall now address the reliability of the utilitarian arguments about the use of torture. Gisli Gudjonsson, the Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, has carried out extensive research in police interviewing in cases of false or disputed confessions in the UK. In over half the cases he reviewed, the psychological vulnerability of the person being interviewed led to a false confession—under ordinary police questioning rather than under coercive or oppressive interviewing. It is not only people with learning disabilities or who are frankly mentally ill who make false confessions. We know well that suggestible, impulsive and submissive people who would be considered psychologically robust will agree to all kinds of things put to them, even when the long-term implications for them could be catastrophic. How much more likely then is it that improper, oppressive questioning, and the threat or reality of torture, would produce evidence of no value whatever? It is not in doubt that that kind of evidence is frequently on offer from overseas sources. Even when evidence can be accepted, though unreliable, with other corroborating evidence, it really is never enough to justify the impact that it has on the perpetrators. I read earlier this year Professor Mirko Bagaric at the Deakin Law School defending the official use of torture, even of innocent individuals, in the face of possible terrorist acts if the information would save lives. Alan Dershowitz at Harvard has written very much in the same vein, although he says that he prefers judges and presidents to make the decision and that it should not be perpetrated by ““low-level people””. He suggests that sterilised needles under the nail could be acceptable—I am glad that he said they should be sterilised. That was written by him on websites pertaining to his department. The ends do not justify the means. We degrade our own humanity in the process of doing so. For that reason, I join with the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and others who have spoken, in saying that we must not condone, under any circumstances, returning people to regimes where we know that they are likely to be tortured. Indeed, we should impress on our friends among the international community that we will not condone their torture either.