The Role of National Courts in Preventing Torture of Suspected Terrorists

review of specific methods has also the benefit of disengagement from actual situations of emergency. Such prospective rulings could guide interrogators and prevent excessive harm to detainees. An example for a petition seeking such ruling is the petition concerning the method of 'shaking', a method proven to carry fatal consequences.* One problem with the prescription, of general rules on interrogation methods, however, is the effect that such prescription may have on interrogators: a prospective approval of a certain method has more potential for misuse by interrogators who know that this method has been sanctioned in principle. Indeed, the Landau Guidelines were criticized inter alia for the effect that their very articulation had of increasing the probability of interrogators' violence. Yet this critique does not apply to a 'reverse-Landau' approach, namely to rulings that define clearly which practices are proscribed under any circumstances, practices which are clearly brutal and can never be 78 CA. (Civil Appeal) 532/91, unpublished, decided on IS August 1991 (English translation appended to the Israeli statement to CAT. supra note 76). 79 (Author'l translation), ibid, at section 8. The mitigating circumstances cited were the interrogators' clean record, their selfless motives, the pressing and difficult conditions under which they operated, their subsequent removal from the GSS, and this being a first conviction of this sort 80 Decision on the petition to ootUw this method is still pending: supra note 13. 81 See Kadish, Tortnre, The State and The Individual', 23 Itr.LRev. (1989) 345, at 356

Criminology · Human rights · Political science · Torture · Criminal Law and Evidence · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law