Why Torture Became Unacceptable: Algeria, Greece, and Brazil Compared

This paper looks at the development of international public opinion regarding the use of torture in three key cases in the 1960s and early 1970s: Algeria during the conflict with France in the late 1950s and early 1960s; Greece under the junta after 1967; and Brazil under a military dictatorship that began to torture political opponents in 1969.  The paper focuses on the arguments and tactics developed by transnational networks of intellectuals, journalists, religious groups, and nongovernmental organizations, and draws on published and archival material from these groups.  It traces the emergence of key assumptions about torture and human rights that would come to fruition in the “human rights revolution” of the 1970s.  In Algeria, international opinion mobilized primarily around the issue of decolonization.  In contrast, by the late 1960s, torture in Greece and in Brazil drew widespread condemnation and helped spur Amnesty International’s 1972-1973 campaign “to make torture as unthinkable as slavery.”  Greece and Brazil thus spurred significant changes in public opinion and eventually in international law.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights had declared torture illegal in 1948, but the prohibition lacked enforcement mechanisms, and the assumption that what a state did to its own citizens was its own business remained largely intact.  This changed in the 1970s, with increasing pressure at the United Nations to establish enforcement and monitoring mechanisms and to target specific violators.  This paper several explanations for the growth of an anti-torture norm and a more interventionist approach to human rights.