Amnesty International’s campaign against torture, which was begun in 1972, culminated in the adoption of the Twelve-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture.
Amnesty International’s campaign against torture began almost incidentally in 1965, almost four years after the organization’s founding by Peter Benenson. Two Amnesty International publications on prison conditions, one on South Africa and the other on Portugal and Romania, noted evidence that physical and mental pain were being applied against prisoners. The South African report indicated no official guidance on prisoners’ torture; wardens were allowed to devise their own means of interrogation, which included burying prisoners up to their necks and then urinating into their mouths. By contrast, the report on Portugal showed a well-organized system of torture. For example, when thirty-one students were arrested in 1965, they were subjected to the “statue” treatment, which involved having the prisoner stand and preventing him or her from sleeping more than ten minutes at a time. The Romania report was primarily of historical value, as Romania’s prisons were empty of political detainees at the time the information was released.
In 1968, Amnesty International’s membership rose to include twenty national sections, and its funds increased substantially. Because it now had the resources to take on a new mission, the organization began to address the problem of worldwide torture itself. Amnesty’s secretary-general, Martin Ennals, presented a new statute that would streamline the administration of the organization to enable it to cope with what he called its “mammoth objective”: the abolition of torture. This action was taken primarily in response to the Greek coup of 1967, which brought a right-wing military junta to power. As soon as this dictatorship took over the country, six thousand people were arrested. Reports to Amnesty International told of ill-treatment of these prisoners. The standard initial torture was the falanga, which involved beating the soles of a prisoner’s feet with a stick or pipe and then forcing him or her to run through a gauntlet of heavy blows.
A special report on these atrocities, prepared by two lawyers who visited Greece, Anthony Marreco
In December, 1972, Amnesty began its worldwide Campaign for the Abolition of Torture.
The 1972 Amnesty statute was followed a year later by Amnesty’s publication of the first edition of an international survey on torture. This country-by-country report concluded that torture was deliberately used by many nations, often employing the services, either directly or indirectly, of police, soldiers, doctors, civil servants, judges, and scientists. The survey devoted little space to torture methods in communist countries, where torture was unnecessary because the huge secret police forces made opposition almost impossible. Instead, the survey concentrated on Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia. The worst offenders, the survey charged, were Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, and Turkey.
The latest reports came from Chile, where President Salvador Allende
Shortly after Brazil was taken over by a military coup in 1964, Amnesty International was flooded with reports of torture of political prisoners. In 1972, Amnesty published a ninety-page document that gave the names of 1,081 people who had been tortured as well as the names of 81 torturers.
Brazil’s neighbor, Paraguay, was another South American country where atrocities were committed by a military regime.
In 1972, an Amnesty investigation of the atrocities committed in Turkey produced another prisoner of conscience, a woman.
The annual reports that Amnesty published throughout the remainder of the decade found that many governments subscribed to U.N. human rights declarations and resolutions on paper only. Physical methods of torture were still openly used in the 1970’s in dictatorships in Spain, Iran, and Iraq. The Amnesty reports also discovered clandestine torture being used in Third World nations such as Uganda and Ghana. A particularly disturbing trend that emerged at this time was the development of psychiatric and medical techniques designed to control a prisoner’s behavior.
By 1983, it became clear that more formal measures were needed to deal with the worldwide problem of torture. The continued use of old methods of torture as well as the invention of new ones in countries such as Guatemala, Syria, and Rwanda led, in October, to Amnesty International’s adoption of its Twelve-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture. The twelve points are as follows. (1) Law-enforcement personnel must never employ torture; (2) incommunicado detention should not become an opportunity for torture; (3) prisoners must be held in a publicly recognized place; (4) all prisoners must be told of their right to lodge complaints about their treatment; (5) all reports of torture must be independently investigated; (6) evidence obtained through torture should not be invoked in court proceedings; (7) acts of torture must be categorized as punishable offenses under criminal law; (8) torturers should be prosecuted, and there should be no “safe haven”; (9) training procedures of all prison officials must make it clear that torture is a criminal act; (10) victims of torture and their dependents should be entitled to compensation; (11) all nations should intercede with governments accused of torture; and (12) all governments should ratify international instruments containing safeguards and remedies against torture.
Since its birth in 1961, Amnesty International has repeatedly demonstrated to its critics that ordinary people can save from torture men and women they have never met. The publication of Amnesty’s Twelve-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture in its 1984 book-length report Torture in the Eighties helped to mobilize worldwide reaction against torture. Although Amnesty has no scientific way to measure its effectiveness, its stand on torture has clearly struck a nerve in people everywhere. In a number of countries Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico human rights organizations have been formed to combat the use of torture. In the United States alone, more than five hundred groups have formed to help Amnesty International stop torture. In 1984, largely as a response to Amnesty’s annual reports on worldwide torture, the U.S. Congress passed and the president signed into law an American commitment against torture that requires diplomats to report regularly on human rights abuses overseas and to take specific steps to end them.
Following the publication of Torture in the Eighties, thousands of young people all over the world adopted Amnesty’s cause as their own. In September, 1988, a group of performers including Bruce Springsteen,
Probably the most important measure of the effectiveness of Amnesty’s war against torture is the number of governments that have gone to great lengths to improve their image. As a direct result of Amnesty’s publications, a number of nations abolished torture, Portugal, Equatorial Guinea, Democratic Kampuchea (now Cambodia), and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) among them. Other nations, such as Guatemala and Peru, tried to discredit Amnesty by accusing the organization of being part of a communist conspiracy. Some nations, such as Turkey, went so far as to hire public relations firms in the United States to change the way that the world views them as a result of Amnesty’s accusations of torture. These measures on the part of the accused nations demonstrate that one powerful weapon for preventing the use of torture is the mobilization of international opinion and pressure. This has always been, and will continue to be, the primary goal of Amnesty International.
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Amnesty International. Torture in the Eighties. London: Author, 1984. Despite the broad title, this book actually covers only the first three years of the decade. Still, it provides an in-depth look into the ill-treatment of prisoners in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. -
Barber, James David. “The Fight to Stop Torture.” USA Today 116 (November, 1987): 29-31. Picks up where the Amnesty International book cited above leaves off, with a close look at the ways in which some nations defend and justify their use of torture. Ends with a paraphrase of Amnesty’s Twelve-Point Program for the Prevention of Torture. -
Clark, Ann Marie. Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Detailed, scholarly history of the organization and its impact on international law. Bibliography. -
Larsen, Egon. A Flame in Barbed Wire: The Story of Amnesty International. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Standard history of Amnesty International is filled with case histories and photographs. -
Power, Jonathan. Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International. New York: Allen Lane, 2001. Thorough account of the forty-year history of the organization. Examines human rights violations in places such as Guatemala, Nigeria, Argentina, Germany, and China.
Medical Group Exposes Torture in Greece and Chile
Tokyo Declaration Forbids Medical Abuses and Torture
United Nations Issues a Declaration Against Torture
National Commission Against Torture Studies Human Rights Abuses
Amnesty International Exposes the Cruelty of the Death Penalty