REDRESS’s Casebook Series Features Leading Strategic Cases Against Torture
This blog piece introduces our new series of Casebooks cataloguing leading strategic cases against torture. Other blog posts in the series feature legal representatives and experts in the field of strategic litigation against torture discussing the strategic impact of cases included in our Casebook I.
By Blánaid Ní Chearnaigh, Legal Officer at REDRESS
There are different ways in which strategic litigation can be deployed to challenge torture and secure justice and reparation for survivors.
For instance, human rights litigation can be used to hold governments to account before national courts, the regional human rights systems, the UN Treaty Bodies, and Charter based procedures. Criminal law can be used to punish individual perpetrators on a national or international basis, or through universal jurisdiction. Alternatively, individuals and companies can be sued through civil cases to prove their responsibility for torture, ill-treatment, and other human rights violations, and obtain reparation.
In many instances, this involves the use of multiple approaches and strategies on the part of civil society, including advocacy, activism, and use of the media.
REDRESS has a long track record of using strategic litigation against torture to deliver justice and reparation for survivors, adopting a holistic approach that supports and accompanies the torture survivor through the process.
Holistic strategic litigation ensures that the legal action has impact beyond the individual case, effecting broader societal change by challenging individual acts of torture and other ill-treatment at the same time as it challenges the policies and practices that enable such acts to take place. While legal processes can be lengthy, they play a vital role in advancing human rights and ensuring accountability, particularly when coupled with other strategic techniques to bring justice to bear.
For example, Aydin v. Turkey was one of the first cases to be heard by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as part of a broader advocacy campaign by the Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) to challenge the use of torture and other human rights violations against Kurdish people before international mechanisms. The case stood as an international precedent in establishing rape as torture and paved the way for similar cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to be decided affirmatively. to be decided affirmatively.
In Timurtaş v. Turkey, the ECtHR accepted circumstantial evidence to establish the enforced disappearance of the victim, a conclusion that helped find substantive violations of the victim’s right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights) in similar cases. The outcome was possible because of the close collaboration between civil society organisations and lawyers.
More recently, the strategic vision to file multiple cases in different locations before consolidating them into a complaint in Doe v. Chiquita Brands International strengthened the forums and breadth of the arguments involved. Combined with great legal stamina, this ensured that an American jury held, for the first time, a major US corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country after 17 years of legal proceedings.
While the legal outcomes of these cases may be widely known, the approaches taken and their strategic impact are less well known.
This is why REDRESS is launching a series of Torture Litigation Casebooks to showcase around 80 case studies of strategic litigation against torture from around the world — like Aydin, Timurtaş, and Doe — to illustrate best practice and to help strengthen the capacity of human rights lawyers worldwide. Other Casebooks in the series cover UK Cases, Dissent Cases, and Discrimination Cases.
The Casebooks cover all regions, include cases brought before national, regional, and international jurisdictions, and seek to highlight different techniques of strategic litigation against torture, including national and international advocacy; collaborative partnerships; and effective media campaigns. The majority are cases brought by private parties or applicants, invoking human rights norms enshrined in national legislation or constitutions, or resorting to regional or international human rights bodies where national remedies prove ineffective. Some are criminal or inter-State actions. The Casebooks also present a range of innovative legal claims or remedies, and efforts to bring about effective implementation. They are published alongside our Practice Notes.
We hope they will serve as a digestible guide and inspiration for practitioners and activists alike, providing a toolbox of effective strategies to conduct strategic litigation of cases of torture to support survivors in their quest for justice and reparation.
Read a blog piece by Juan Méndez, one of the legal representatives of the petitioners in the Velasquez Rodríguez v. Honduras case, and former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, examines its most strategic features.