BANGLADESH INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND STRATEGIC STUDIES

THE TORTURE CONUNDRUM IN LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

Author: Devasish Datta Chowdhury

DOI Link: https://www.doi.org/10.56888/BIISSj2009v30n4a3

ABSTRACT

People who seek to legitimize and regulate the use of torture may have purposeful intentions, but they choose to overlookits ramifications on a democratic state. In order to end a state of hypocrisy and to ensure accountability stemming from the prevalence of covert use of torture, they are willing to go in for ‘lesser evils’ or make ‘tragic choices’, or in other words, legalize a system that undermines every democratic norm. The indifference to UN’s mission and the international conventions on torture seems affordable to some extent. However, the universal and inviolable nature of the sanctity of human rights is so deeply imprinted, that it has left the proponents of torture to circumvent the problem by redefining torture. It has only confirmed the view that a state cannot afford to alienate the world without undermining its very existence. The interplay between torture and democratic fundamentals in the ‘age of terror’ is bound to have broad ramifications on the global community including the fragile democracies of South Asia. The obnoxious practices of the cabal of democracies led by the United States in the global war on terrorism have earned universal opprobrium, which attests to the incapability of torture with liberal democracies.