Tortured Ethics: An Anthropology of International Law and Politics
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Social and Political Science
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Tobias Kelly (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Kelly T
(2011)
What We Talk about When We Talk about Torture
in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development
Kelly T
(2009)
The UN Committee Against Torture: Human Rights Monitoring and the Legal Recognition of Cruelty
in Human Rights Quarterly
Kelly T
(2012)
Sympathy and suspicion: torture, asylum, and humanity Sympathy and suspicion
in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
KELLY T
(2011)
The cause of human rights: doubts about torture, law, and ethics at the United Nations
in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Kelly Tobias
(2011)
This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty
Kelly Tobias
(2011)
This Side of Silence: Human Rights, Torture, and the Recognition of Cruelty
Tobias Kelly (Author)
(2011)
What We Talk about When We Talk About Torture: A Review Essay
in Humanity
| Description | We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. This project examined the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma.The research asked what forms of suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. It focused on the recent history of Britain but drew wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognise survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. the key finding was that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us. For individual survivors a focus on torture can be counter-productive, as it raises the political and moral stakes, which can seldom be met by the often necessarily limited evidence available. Seemingly more mundane and less charged descriptions of violence may therefore be more pragmatically useful for claimants, but also more helpful for decision-makers as they provide greater specificity." |
| Exploitation Route | The findings could be used in designing human rights strategies. |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice,Security and Diplomacy |
| Description | I was a keynote speaker at a workshop attended by over 60 human rights practitioners on bridging the gap between research and practice at Dignity: Danish Institute Against Torture- one of the largest anti-torture NGOs in the world. Following this presentation I discussed the implications of the book This Side of Silence, in a public forum with practitioners. In response to this discussion, a senior anti-torture activist has written about Kelly's 2012 book that 'few contemporary books are more relevant to the prevention of torture'. I have provided training and guidance for lawyers and decision-makers involved in the asylum process. In 2011 Al-Jazeera commissioned an opinion piece on the documentation of torture, which was picked up by the international press. Working with lawyers suggested by the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, I co-produced a widely distributed Best Practice Guide for Expert Witnesses, which, according to the Chief Executive of a leading asylum organisation, is 'regarded as a valuable tool by both experts and those who wish to instruct them'. The Guide is distributed through the Refugee Legal Group and the Electronic Immigration Network, the leading sources of information for asylum and immigration practitioners. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2011 |
| Sector | Government, Democracy and Justice,Security and Diplomacy |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Policy & public services |