How should reparation for torture be conceptualised and implemented to achieve its ‘ultimate objective ... [that is] the restoration of the dignity of the victim’ [CAT, 2012]
“Fighting for information and truth is redemptive because there is no dignity in ignorance. Fighting for justice for victims and consequences for perpetrators is redemptive because there is no virtue in unaccountable crimes of the state.” – Lisa Hajjar, The War in Court (2024).
Introduction:
In a ruling on 11 April 2025, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay excluded the use of a 9/11 defendant’s confession on the basis that statements were extracted through a campaign of torture and isolation.[2] Ammar al-Baluchi had been, “conditioned through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning.”[3] The ruling is a legal and moral reckoning, and damning indictment of US ‘black-site’ programmes. It is also a reminder that torture breaks more than physical bodies. When the law is used to invalidate confessions obtained under such abuse, it undermines the necessity of torture. What remains unresolved is how to repair what torture destroys.
This essay, therefore, will explore how reparation for torture should be conceptualised and implemented, with a particular focus on the Committee against Torture (“CAT”)’s General Comment No. 3 of 2012 (“GC3”), which states that “restoration of the dignity of the victim is the ultimate objective in the provision of redress.”[4] Drawing on international instruments, interdisciplinary scholarship, jurisprudence, report, and examples from the field, it will ultimately agree with Professor Lutz Oette, that the anti-torture movement must “not confine its aspirations to the extant legal framework,” but rather engage with “wider structural political and economic changes”.[5] For this is where victims’ dignity rests, both now and – if reparations can become a truly and radically transformative project that challenge and prevent the very systems that allowed torture to take place – also in the future, too.
Normative framework and legal obligations:
Article 14 of the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (“UNCAT”) obliges State parties to “ensure in its legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible.”[6] The right to remedy can be found in numerous treaty bodies, as well as the ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law’ (“Basic Principles”), adopted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in December 2005.[7] The Basic Principles helped to establish state obligations, international responsibility, and procedural issues – as well as a range of complementary reparation measures: “restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, measures of satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition”.[8]
GC3 expands on Article 14, and clarifies that the right to redress encompasses not only compensation and rehabilitation, but all five forms of reparation identified in the 2005 Basic Principles above, affirming that the restoration of dignity is the “ultimate objective” of reparation, and states have both a procedural and substantive obligation to fulfil this duty.[9] It defines victims as “persons who have individually or collectively suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights,’ not necessarily requiring a perpetrator.[10] The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR)’s ‘General Comment No 4 on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provided guidance on the right to redress in 2017, endorsing GC3 but expanding and “on the particular context of victims on the African continent in relation to reparation.”[11] Rather than GC3’s primary goal to “restore dignity”, for example, the ACHPR sets its primary goal of redress as “transformation.” CAT’s jurisprudence perhaps falls short of this standard, but Special Rapporteurs have clearly increased their focus on psychological torture in recent years, as well as conflict-related sexual violence as torture.[12]
In May 2022, CAT issued its most recent Concluding Observations to Iraq.[13] The committee commended Iraq´s efforts to redress survivors of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence but remained concerned at the information received on the reported slow progress in implementation of the Yazidi Survivors’ Law (YSL) and the current lack of funds allocated to that effect.[14] It also reiterated concerns raised by the UN Secretary-General that the YSL does not address the status of children born of rape by members of ISIL, and the definition of a survivor does not include members of some minority communities. While noting the progress made with respect to the investigations of abductions by ISIL, it added that concerns remain as to the 2,719 people registered as missing. Furthermore, the Special Rapporteur on Torture visited Iraq in summer 2024, and has pushed sexual-violence in conflict as a form of torture, for example in her speech to survivors in Erbil.[15] Following this, Alice Jill Edwards presented a thematic study focused wartime sexual torture, and specifically the need for providing rehabilitation for victims and survivors, to the UNGA.[16]
Article 14 of UNCAT (which Iraq has signed) recognises the right to redress, and the 2021 YSL established a framework for victim reparations, including a monthly financial stipend for survivors, the right to housing, employment, and psychological rehabilitation, and official recognition of Genocide. On paper, this law is a landmark victory, and groups like the Coalition for Just Reparations (“C4JR”), an organisation of 34 Iraqi NGOs, played a central role in pressuring the Iraqi government to recognise survivors’ rights, alongside international support. At least 2,228 survivors are now receiving reparations.[17] Yet, a major critique of reparation laws like the YSL is the focus on monetary compensation, which while necessary and often overwhelmingly welcomed, can also risk allowing states to ‘buy’ their way out of deeper accountability. Instead, survivors continue to face systemic barriers.[18] Reparation for torture tends too often to be framed as an individual right – prioritising financial transactions, rather than addressing structural harms, or achieving genuine accountability.
GC3 affirms that rehabilitation should not depend on victims pursuing judicial remedies or proving harm in adversarial forums.[19] In July 2023 the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence together with other Special Procedures whose mandate addresses human rights issues covered by the YSL made public a follow up communication sent to Iraq regarding imposition of additional requirements for survivors to file a criminal complaint to be eligible for reparation under the YSL.[20] As Oette notes, “Satisfaction constitutes one of the most important forms of reparation for torture and other ill treatment.”[21]. In Guridi v Spain, CAT held that financial compensation alone did not fulfil Spain’s obligation under Article 14, because the perpetrators had been pardoned.[22] Reparation, the Committee stated, must encompass “restitution, compensation, rehabilitation... and guarantees of non-repetition.”[23]
When “survivor-led” becomes rhetoric:
The obligations of the state to provide rehabilitation to victims of torture or ill-treatment is therefore problematic when the state is complicit, as Nora Sveaas, Felice Gaer, and Claudio Grossman’s article on Article 14 addresses, as well as GC3’s extensive list of “Obstacles to the right to redress”.[24] Andrea Schuechner and Johanna Lober’s survey of CAT’s jurisprudence shows how deeply procedural hurdles impede access to redress – noting the extensive reservations made by states upon accession to UNCAT.[25] They also note how, GC3 sets out the Committee’s understanding of a ‘long-term and integrated approach’ to rehabilitation, which should be in accordance with the Istanbul Protocol.”[26] In human rights discourse, “survivor-led processes” or “victim participation” are popular buzzwords. GC3 uses similar language to endorse the participation of victims in such rehabilitation programmes, and the concept certainly seems empowering – and necessary. According to Oette, “As torture is characterized by powerlessness, reparation is a process of redressing its power imbalances, symbolically and practically,” therein rests the importance of victim and survivor agency.[27] But in practice, such phrases can be invoked to show ethical legitimacy without interrogation. What does a “survivor-led” process look like in a fractured, post-conflict zone where the state is absent or distrusted or even, in many cases, complicit?
The UN’s guidance on transitional justice in conflict and post conflict societies, defines transitional justice as, “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”[28] Deborah Isser notes the necessity of looking far beyond a “Western rule-of-law” template, if international law is ever to address the healing of communities in other post-conflict zone locations, challenging the “tendency to see justice reform as a technical legal task rather than a deeply sociological and political dynamic.[29] There are many examples. Although the UDHR is conspicuously silent on the death penalty, developments in international human rights over the previous century – including additional protocols to the ICCPR – have clearly resulted in a firmer consensus towards its abolishment, as well as its relationship to torture. The Human Rights Committee (CCPR)’s General Comment 36, for instance, notes that the ICCPR requires both that the death penalty be restricted to “intentional killing” and that it not be mandatory in cases of homicide – not outlawing it completely (unlike Optional Protocol 1).[30] Many Islamic societies would disagree. Tribal Law in Anbar, for instance, provides for reparations in the form of Diyya payments or punishment, awarded through existing dispute resolution procedures.[31]
Furthermore, Dr Luke Moffett’s Belfast Guidelines on Reparations in Post-Conflict Societies highlights the “substantial implementation gap and time lag” between violations and redress, therefore taking an approach that seeks to “dispel some of the complexity” around translating international obligations into practice.[32] “Reparations should be delivered alongside other peacebuilding and conflict transformation programmes, such as the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of fighters,” the Guidelines advise.[33] This is most notable when considering non-state armed groups (NSAG), whose engagement with reparations can play a crucial role in societies as they transition out of conflict, international law falls too short – with NSAGs traditionally being “overlooked as stakeholders in reparations processes” (with no explicit international obligation) despite the immense benefit that engagement with such processes can provide both victims and perpetrators.[34]
Nimisha Patel, writing on psychological rehabilitation for torture survivors and their families and wider communities, observes that the language of trauma recovery is often imported (or imposed?) from Western clinical paradigms.[35]This risks re-traumatising survivors by individualising pain, abstracting it from political context, and privileging formal therapy over collective, culturally-embedded healing practices. In Iraq, for example, survivors of torture often find support through networks and practices which sit outside of the scope of state-run rehabilitation programmes – despite the best efforts of many.[36] Would NGOs be comfortable with truly “survivor-led” reparations, even if they are anti-institutional, against “International Law”, and possibly resisting the frameworks that humanitarian actors seek to implement, even with the best will (and donors) in the world?
Dignity beyond law?
The legal framework of UNCAT obliges States to provide reparation, but it does not (and it cannot) contain the full meaning of dignity. This is because, to restore dignity is not to deliver a service, but restore agency. And this requires letting go of control. This essay proposes that while legal reparation is necessary to affirm rights, it is insufficient to restore dignity. Dignity, as understood by torture survivors and their communities, whom jurisprudence also recognises as being victims, deserve the freedom to work within proposed frameworks and to choose not to, if considered ‘detached from their grassroots constituents.’[37] Many victims are well-aware of the contradictions in international law; the expectation that the same systems that enabled torture can now deliver justice for it. As can be seen in the Iraq context, there is a danger of victim hierarchies entrenching existing power asymmetries. Reparation can reinforce a state’s power over survivors rather than empowering survivors to define justice on their own terms – and as Oette sets out, can negatively reframe the relational dynamics of torture, enacting “a power asymmetry that seeks to degrade both the individual victims, often as dehumanized representatives of a group, and the group as such”.[38]What of the rights of perpetrator communities, for instance? To restore dignity, reparation must also involve dismantling the structures that enable torture (and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, reading Article 16 into Article 14).[39] This means challenging impunity through prosecution and through the redistribution of power and resources, enabling survivor communities to create their own rituals of justice and healing, and refusing the fantasy that law alone can restore dignity.
In GC3, the Committee suggests that reparation should have a transformative, preventive effect.[40] This must therefore include guarantees of non-repetition that restructure the social, economic, and political conditions that enabled torture. In Iraq, this could mean recognising the intersection of gender-based violence, or religious conflict, or environmental displacement in reparation frameworks. It could mean truly deferring to grassroots survivor networks, and recognising non-state rituals as equal methods of justice.
Conclusion:
Lisa Hajjar’s framing of ‘the war in court’ as a “redemptive project” shows the immense failings of successive US administrations to atone for torture programmes, let alone provide meaningful reparations.[41] To restore dignity after torture must mean more than just redressing harm – it demands that we reclaim the voices of victims, and hear their stories, and make the necessary and difficult political changes. While UNCAT and its General Comments provide an important legal framework, the real work of providing reparations must happen beyond the law; in collective struggles and solidarity that defies codification. As Oette explains, “Combating torture and the pursuit of accountability and reparation is to a considerable extent a political project. It has to address authoritarian governments, legacies of violence, problematic policies and practices.”[42]
Hilary Charlesworth and David Kennedy advise asking, “what international law offers to people who want to violate international law and to investigate how international law is implicated in the problems we have set out to solve.”[43]Legal frameworks can and have affirmed dignity, but too often, implementation is far too late. Or not at all. It has already been a week since the US military judge ruled that al-Baluchi’s confession was inadmissible because it was obtained through torture. In Iraq, Yazidi survivors still wait for the full implementation of reparations promised under the YSL. Others – men, mostly, falsely accused of being affiliated with ISIS – remain in prison, convicted after confessions extracted under torture, many barely adults when arrested. And in Gaza, there are no words to write that would reflect the immense suffering of Palestinians, as state violence continues to devastate lives. What does it mean to speak of dignity and justice in our world today? Reparations cannot be just about legal frameworks, but rather seeking to unbuild the violence of the world and creating something entirely new in its place.
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[1] Lisa Hajjar, The War in Court (University of California Press 2024) 312.
[2] Carol Rosenberg, ‘Military Judge Throws Out Sept. 11 Case Confession as Obtained Through Torture’ New York Times (11 April 2025) <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/us/politics/sept-11-confession-torture.html> accessed 17 April 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Committee against Torture, ‘General Comment 3: Implementation of article 14 by States parties’ UN Doc CAT/C/GC/3 (19 November 2012) 4.
[5] Lutz Oette, The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law (OUP 2024) 184.
[6] Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (10 December 1984) S Treaty Doc No 100-20, 1465 UNTS 85, Article 14(1).
[7] ACHPR, ‘General Comment No 4 on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights: The Right to Redress for Victims of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’ (2017); ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law’ UN General Assembly RES/60/147 (16 December 2005).
[8] Ibid, Principles 19-23.
[9] Committee against Torture, ‘General Comment 3’ 11-13.
[10] Ibid 3.
[11] ACHPR, ‘General Comment No 4 on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 35.
[12] Report of the Special Rapporteur, Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, UN Doc A/HRC/43/49 (20 March 2020); Owen Bowcott, ‘UN warns of rise of 'cybertorture' to bypass physical ban’ The Guardian (21 February 2020); Alice Jill Edwards, ‘It’s time to treat sexual violence in war as torture, writes a UN rapporteur,’ The Economist (3 March 2025).
[13] ‘Concluding observations on the second periodic report of Iraq’ UNCAT/C/IRQ/CO/2 (15 June 2022).
[14] Ibid 20; Yazidi [Female] Survivors’ Law (1 March 2021) <https://c4jr.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Yazidi-Female-Survivors-Law-March-24-2021.pdf> accessed 1 March 2025.
[15] Alice Jill Edwards, Keynote speech on ‘Indicators to Monitor Implementation of the Right to Rehabilitation, “Repairing the Irreparable: Remedies, Rehabilitation and Reparations for Survivors, Families and Communities Impacted by Sexual Torture in Armed Conflict”’ (14 June 2024).
[16] Alice Jill Edwards, UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Statement to 79 Session UNGA, UN Doc A/79/181 (18 July 2022).
[17] ‘C4JR YSL Newsletter’ Coalition for Just Reparations (December 2024).
[18] ‘More than “Ink on Paper”: Third Yazidi Survivors’ Law Monitoring Report’ Coalition for Just Reparations (28 February 2025), 36 <https://c4jr.org/2802202530143> accessed 1 March 2025.
[19] Committee against Torture, ‘General Comment 3’ 15.
[20] ‘Joint Special Rapporteurs to the Government of Iraq’ AL IRQ 3/2023 (10 May 2023).
[21] Oette, The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law (OUP 2024) 174-5.
[22] Kepa Urra Guridi v Spain, 212/2002, UN Doc CAT/C/34/D/212/2002 (17 May 2005) 6.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Nora Sveaas, Felice Gaer, and Claudio Grossman, ‘Rehabilitation in Article 14 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’ in Malcolm D. Evans and Jens Modvig (eds) Research Handbook on Torture: Legal and Medical Perspectives on Prohibition and Prevention (2020) 478; Committee against Torture, ‘General Comment 3’ 37-43.
[25] Johanna Lober and Andrea Schuchner, ‘Article 14: Rights of Torture Victims to Adequate Remedy and Reparation’ in Manfred Nowak, Moritz Birk and Giuliani Monina (eds), The United Nations Convention Against Torture and its Optional Protocol: A Commentary(OUP 2019) 371-416; 377.
[26] Ibid 411; Istanbul Protocol: Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, OHCHR (29 June 2022).
[27] Oette, The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law 170.
[28] United Nations, ‘The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: Report of the Secretary General’ UN Doc S/2004/616 (23 August 2004).
[29] Deborah Isser (ed.), Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War-torn Societies (United States Institute of Peace 2011) 10, 325.
[30] Report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, A/HRC/4/20 (29 January 2007); ‘The Death Penalty under International Law’ International Bar Association (2008) 16; Human Rights Committee (CCPR), ‘General Comment 36: Right to Life’ UN Doc CCPR/C/GC/36 (3 September 2019), 35-37.
[31] Patricio Asfura-Heim, ‘Tribal Customary Law and Legal Pluralism in al Anbar, Iraq’ in Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War-torn Societies (United States Institute of Peace 2011) 262.
[32] Luke Moffett, Belfast Guidelines on Reparations in Post-Conflict Societies (Queen’s University Belfast 2022) 4.
[33] Ibid 27.
[34] Moffett, Engaging Non-State Armed Groups on Reparations (Queen’s University Belfast 2022) 4-5.
[35] Nimisha Patel, ‘Psychological care for torture survivors, their families and communities’ in Malcolm D. Evans and Jens Modvig (eds) Research Handbook on Torture: Legal and Medical Perspectives on Prohibition and Prevention (Edward Elgar 2020) 525.
[36] Nimisha Patel and Bojan Gavrilovic (eds.) ‘Right to Rehabilitation as Reparation for Survivors of Grave Human Rights Violations,’ Coalition for Just Reparations (12 June 2024) <https://c4jr.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Rehabilitation-Guideline-English-final.pdf> accessed 1 March 2025.
[37] Afro-Descendant Communities Displaced from the Cacarica River Basin (Operation Genesis) v Colombia, Inter-American Court of Human Rights Series C No. 270 (20 November 2013) 469-76; Moffett, Handbook on Civil Society Organisations and Donors Engagement on Reparations (Queen’s University Belfast 2022) 83
[38] Oette, The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law 177.
[39] UNCAT, Articles 14 and 16.
[40] Committee against Torture, ‘General Comment 3’ 2, 6.
[41] Hajjar, The War in Court 312.
[42] Oette, The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law 184.
[43] Hilary Charlesworth and David Kennedy, ‘Afterword: and forward – there remains so much we do not know’ in Anne Orford, International Law and its Others (Cambridge University Press 2006) 406.
