Justifying Torture:
Explaining Democratic States' Noncompliance with International Humanitarian Laws
By Emily Kanstroom
One day a Moroccan girl in one of Emily Kanstroom’s classes at Paris’s renowned Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) asked how Americans could be proud of their country, given its recent string of disturbing human rights abuses in the War on Terror. Though Emily explained to the class that not all Americans agree with the actions of their government, she was unsatisfied with her own response. The Moroccan girl had a point, she thought. How could the United States—the historically great champion of human rights and democracy—fail to observe international humanitarian law during a war that was set up to deliver it?
Emily had planned on writing her thesis on the U.S. Global War on Terror prior to leaving for France on her Brown University study abroad program. She chose Sciences Po because of her interest in French culture and politics as well as for the international, rigorously intellectual flavor of the institution. Through the connections she made with knowledgeable faculty, students, and institutions, Emily found a wealth of resources specializing in political science, sociology, history and law. When one of her professors suggested that she look into France’s analogous record of human rights protection and violation, Emily finally had her research topic. After returning to Brown, focusing her questions and securing a grant, she returned to France to complete her thesis.
Specifically, Emily compared U.S. noncompliance with international humanitarian law during its Global War on Terror with that of France in the French-Algerian War. “Although the Geneva Conventions banned torture over 50 years ago, compliance is not universal,” she writes. She identifies three main explanations for the disregard for human rights by these two great liberal democracies. These include the state’s perception of the enemy, the belief that the human rights violations will increase security, and the idea that reputation is less vital than the concerns of the conflict. She finds that disregard for international law has varied with direct proportion to how much the states consider their enemies as “uncivilized” or “terrorist.” On the U.S. side, her case studies analyze the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the lack of due process for the detainees in Guantanimo Bay, and other abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to Emily, pressure from NGOs and individual activists is crucial in confronting state-justified torture. She hopes that her research will help encourage changes and updates to international humanitarian law. In particular, she notes the need to address the “paradigm of terrorist warfare,” in which states deem that human rights standards do not apply to combatants of terrorist regimes.
“This is not an American problem, nor is it a French problem; it is a systemic failure,” Emily now says. “International humanitarian law in the modern era has not successfully prohibited torture even among the world’s most liberal democracies. This affects every country in the world now.”