How Torture Became Part of Health Law

Over the past twenty-five years, the Center for Health Law, Ethics, and Human Rights (CLER) has been a leader in torture treatment, advocacy, and education. In 1998, the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights (BCRHHR) was founded to provide holistic treatment to asylum seekers who have been tortured by their governments and justifiably feared further persecution if they returned to their countries. Seeking justice is an important part of healing for survivors, and BCRHHR clinicians work closely with immigration attorneys to document clinical evidence of torture to support asylum applications. Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, it was revealed that the U.S. government tortured captives and committed other war crimes. CLER scholars examined how doctors and lawyers worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to rationalize and sanitize torture, providing legal immunity for perpetrators. My colleagues and I at CLER assumed a national leadership role in opposing practices that constitute torture, as well as cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. These practices included the force-feeding of hunger strikers, the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program (a covert operation involving disappearances, extrajudicial detentions, and torture of suspects in the so-called "War on Terror"), the use of lawyers and physicians to justify these actions, and U.S. policies that authorized torture. We met with military officials of the Department of Defense (DOD) and hosted a meeting with international experts to brainstorm solutions. We evaluated the devastating effects of the U.S. torture program on detainees and testified in the military commission's pretrial hearings for a detainee accused of terrorism.Doctors and lawyers at the CLER have focused on understanding contemporary torture and the relevance of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial which condemned Nazi doctors for torturing prisoners. The CLER continues to promote the importance of International Human Rights Law.