The Legal Obligation to Prevent and Prosecute Torture

Date: 
Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Gonzaga University School of Law, Spokane
Please join us at this ACLU sponsored event, presentation from the Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture.
 
From the event’s hosts:
 
“This is one of a series of events related to the trial of "torture psychologists" James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, CIA contractors who developed and then helped carry out its illegal, blacksite torture program during the Bush-Cheney administration. The ACLU is suing the psychologists on behalf of two torture victims and the survivors of a 3rd torture victim who was killed in CIA custody.
 
KEYNOTE ADDRESS (via Skype): JUAN E. MENDEZ
 
Mendez was UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2010-2016) and is widely respected as an authority on and advocate for the enforcement of international and national laws against torture. Mendez is currently Professor of Human Rights Law in Residence
Washington College of Law, Washington, DC, See http://antitorture.org/rapporteurship/who-is-juan-mendez/
 
Commentators:
LISA HAJJAR, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2013, Hajjar published Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights and is currently writing on a book tentatively titled The War in Court: The Legal Campaign against US Torture in the ‘War on Terror.’ See http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/lisa-hajjar
 
Topic: The politics of accountability for torture. Accountability is not only legally important, it is also politically important to demonstrate respect for the anti-torture norm. The US torture policy and the lack of accountability has had deleterious effects globally. I will focus on the various efforts in the US and abroad to pursue accountability against those responsible for torture as well as the fates of those efforts, and situate the Jessen and Mitchell trial in this context. However this case concludes, the fact that it is going forward may be an opening for new efforts in the future, and I would suggest that the optimistic perspective is well argued by Kathryn Sikkink in The Justice Cascade.
 
UPENDRA ACHARYA, Associate Professor, Gonzaga University Law School. Acharya specializes in international, Constitutional, administrative and comparative law. See https://www.law.gonzaga.edu/faculty/profiles/acharya-upendra/
 
Topic: the geographic scope of the Convention against Torture as a legal matter. Its application within and beyond the territory is one of the major grey areas of the Convention. He will also provide a structural analysis of the dual nature of the violations of the Convention against Torture that need to be interpreted against the broader background of geographical context.”
 
You can watch the event’s livestream online here.
 
For more information, visit the Facebook event page here.