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ABSTRACT
Focusing on the Committee Against Torture, this article argues that human rights monitoring can hide as much as it reveals. In particular, monitoring should be understood as a "second order" process that displaces the discussion of the causes and consequences of violence in favor of a focus on the systems that are supposed to monitor cruelty. In this process, measurements, monitoring, and prevention are in danger of becoming merged. As such, the ways in which the Committee Against Torture produces and assesses information serves simultaneously to create a depoliticized conception of violence and to reproduce political inequalities between states.
INTRODUCTION
Torture is perhaps the most widely prohibited of all human rights violations and has a significant place in virtually every major international human rights instrument. At the heart of the international prohibition of torture lies the UN Committee Against Torture ("the Committee"), which is charged with monitoring compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment ("CAT"). The work of the Committee plays an important role in defining torture and ensuring that states comply with CAT. As with the other UN human rights committees, however, it lacks the means of enforcement. Instead, the Committee reviews reports from states, alongside information from NGOs and other international bodies, and then issues non-binding recommendations. As such, the Committee is best understood as a form of knowledge production. Based in tranquil Geneva, it sorts, prioritizes, and distinguishes between vast amounts of information.
The recognition of torture presents unique challenges. Torture's particular stigma, as one of the most universally recognized violations of human rights raises the stakes for those states accused of torture. Very few, if any, states willingly admit that they participate in torture. Furthermore, despite its apparent moral absolutism, torture remains a notoriously slippery category to define because its meaning constantly shifts under pressure. Finally, the overwhelming pain of torture, and the often subtle ways it is administered, can block forms of communication, which in turn creates doubt about torture's very existence in any given case.1 Any attempt to recognize torture must therefore overcome serious political, legal, and epistemological hurdles.
This article turns the ethnographic gaze on the human rights monitoring process, in order to determine the forms of...