Human Wrongs Watch
The U.S. use of torture when interrogating prisoners captured in its “War on Terror” has damaged the country’s moral high ground and created a set-back in the global fight against the condemnable practice, a UN human rights expert declared. Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that governments must ramp up their efforts in eradicating the practice of torture and compensate the victims of this “most vicious of crimes.”
Juan Mendez, Special Rapporteur on Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas
“The example set by the United States on the use of torture has been a big draw-back in the fight against such practice in many other countries throughout the world,” Juan Mendez, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, on 11 December 2014 said in a news release*.
As a Special Rapporteur with a mandate to visit numerous countries across the globe, he added that now Member States were either implicitly or explicitly telling him “Why look at us? If the US tortures, why can’t we do it?”
“We have lost a little bit of the moral high ground,” he continued. “But it can be regained and it should be regained.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 