Human Rights Against Terrorism

Submitted By jasleensingh123
Words: 1114
Pages: 5

The extents, to which a liberal democracy can exercise its legal power in order to obtain their perceived interests before their actions has become an act of torture to the political interpretation of our society. Numerous democratic countries around the world that enhance of empathizing human rights and protection against abuse have been caught using highly coercive interrogation methods when dealing with terrorism. Although torture may be an internationally recognize illegal action, it has not stopped countries such as the United States of America who have been driven by global terrorism from bending its rules. Hence, in the name of human rights against terrorism, countries support human wrongs. This essay will examine how coercive interrogation methods are against the concepts of liberty and justice, freedom and morality, which outweigh any hypothetical benefits. In this debate, we are faced with the question, “On what justification may torture be justified in the name of national security”? In the articles “Ends, means and barbarity – Torture; The use and abuse of torture,” “Rules of War Enable Terror,” “The Torture of Myth,”, “FRONTLINE: Is Torture Ever Justified?”, “Bin Laden death rekindles torture debate” and “Terrorists Have No Geneva Rights” a wide variety of views on torture are expressed .Some individuals such as Juliette Kayyem, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedys School of Government, suggests, “Interrogation is a skill, not a legal standard” (FRONTLINE SITE). In contrast, statistics prove that “nine out of ten people can be persuaded to talk with no stress methods at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones “(Herrington, p.1). In the past, the United States has been caught and exposed by the media for engaging in the torture of suspects of war crimes. However, the nation continues to claim that it is abiding by all international agreements prohibiting torture. To avoid another act of terrorism such as the 9/11 attacks on the nations’ iconic World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, the United States has adopted new strategies of interrogation against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world. Although regulations on abuse and torture such as the Geneva Conventions have been established to protect the individuals, they are not always obeyed righteously. The Geneva Conventions has outlined rules to regulate this issue but they “are outdated and are written so broadly that they have become a sword used by terrorist to kill civilians, rather than to protect civilians from terrorist” (Dershowitz, 2012, p.1). International law must to appropriately balance safeguarding human rights and avoiding human wrong. In past cases, such as that of Britain vs. Ireland, clear-cut examples of the use of torture for the purpose of obtaining interrogation goals are prevalent. Until Britain was ordered by a supreme court to change its interrogation methods, Britain previously used the coercive techniques of:”(1) hooding, (2) wall standing, (3) subjection to noise,(4) relative deprivation of food and water and (5)sleep deprivation”(Fortunate link). As humans, we must question ourselves as to when the reasonable and practical time to react to torture and how it can be justified in our society is. Depending on the number of lives being tortured in “ticking bomb” scenarios, individual opinions differ as to whether torture is appropriate to exercise. Although torture may not be the most ethical mode of getting results, there are surely some benefits of using torture during interrogation procedures. The most obvious of them being that with the use of coercive interrogation, government officials are capable of retrieving information from terrorists and war crime members that would not be otherwise possible. Without being faced with fear, captive individuals would just keep quite and put nations at risk of future attacks. According to Dershowitz (2012), the society is then face with the decision of “allowing those who plan