The jurisprudential gold standard needs to be revisited
Following the release of the British sailors from Iran, there has been considerable interest in why the Navy personnel condemned British involvement in Iraq and made admissions of their alleged incursions into Iran’s waters. The reason the sailors gave was that they had been tortured. The details of this ‘torture’ ranged from hearing carpentry outside their cells (implicitly linked to manufacture of their coffins), being told they would never see their children again, and, terrifyingly, being told they looked like Mr Bean.
Minimum severity threshold
There are some who sympathise with the sailors when clearly a degree of intimidation forced them to appear craven on world television. But loose use of the word torture is misleading.
It is becoming very difficult to establish a finding of torture in the European court according to European Convention on Human Rights jurisprudence and the word should not be used lightly. The threshold created to filter lesser claims of human indignity, somewhat short of torture, known as
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