Everything you know about police interviewing is wrong

Richard Carver writes:

Everyone knows, I think, that one of the commonest justifications for torture is the so-called ticking bomb scenario. In this thought experiment, you (the security forces) have in custody a terrorist suspect who has knowledge of a bomb that is primed to explode in a very short time, threatening the lives of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of innocent people. Torture is advocated as the only possible chance of saving those lives. Most people who say that they would countenance torture in some circumstances probably have a situation like this in mind.

There are a number of arguments against torture in this scenario, but anti-torture campaigners have often contented themselves with saying that the whole premise is imaginary – that it doesn’t happen in real life. But Oslo police superintendent Asbjorn Rachlew knows that this is untrue. In the biggest case of his career, Rachlew was faced with a real life ticking bomb scenario. He used his training – a PhD in psychology and expertise in the new techniques of investigative interviewing – to defuse the case.

The case, of course, was that of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right terrorist who murdered 77 people on a July day in 2011 by a bomb attack in Oslo and a shooting spree at a Labour party youth camp on the island of Utoya. What is less well known is that when Breivik was arrested he told police that two other “units” were poised to attack. He created, in effect, a ticking bomb. The Norwegian authorities did not know at this stage that the supposed accomplices were a figment of Breivik’s imagination, but did not even take a step down the path towards torture. Rather, they assigned Superintendent Rachlew, a man trying to persuade the police of the superiority of a new form of interviewing.

Asbjorn and I were both invited speakers at an important event last week organized by the Danish government in its capacity as president of the Council of Europe, along with the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY) and the Convention Against Torture Initiative. The purpose was to encourage European governments to develop safeguards against torture in the early hours after arrest. The finding of my research with Lisa Handley was that these safeguards constituted the most important protection against torture and ill-treatment. Julia Kozma from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and I discussed the importance and impact of detention safeguards. Asbjorn and Laurence Alison from the University of Liverpool introduced the concept of investigative interviewing.

Juan Mendez and Asbjorn Rachlew

At the same time as Lisa and I launched our book at the UN in 2016, Juan Mendez was presenting his final report as Special Rapporteur on Torture. He recommended the adoption of an international protocol on investigative interviewing. The rationale for this corresponded to an important finding in our research: when police and prosecutors reduce the reliance on confession evidence, then the incidence of torture declines.

As Asbjorn Rachlew puts it, investigative interviewing “operationalizes the presumption of innocence.” We have all watched TV dramas or read police procedural novels where the interrogator’s killer move is to confront the suspect with a piece of evidence that must be explained away. Yet, in reality, this is extremely dangerous. It aims at testing only one hypothesis –  the one that the investigators have already adopted – rather than looking at all possible explanations, including those in which the suspect is innocent. The effect of taking a much more open-ended approach, not initially confronting the suspect with specific evidence,  protects the suspect’s rights, but is also much more likely to lead to an accurate conclusion to the investigation and avert the risk of a miscarriage of justice. Even leaving aside coerced confessions, 25% of confessions are false. For juveniles the proportion is much higher. And a conviction based on a false confession is not only a violation of the rights of the suspect; it also means that the real culprit has walked free and remains a threat to the community. Indeed, as we discussed in our book, investigative interviewing was a technique developed by British police in response to a number of high profile miscarriages of justice based upon false confessions (some of them involving torture).

Asbjorn Rachlew now spends much of his time training police internationally in investigative interviewing, with positive results in superficially unlikely places such as Indonesia and Vietnam – for the simple reason that the techniques work. The campaign to adopt an international standard on investigative interviewing continues. The Convention Against Torture Initiative, established by several states to promote ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture and to help states implement their obligations, has this excellent background document on investigative interviewing.

Civilian protection in urban sieges

Chas Morrison from Coventry University is presenting this week's Work in Progress seminar on Civilian Protection in Urban Sieges: capacities and practices of first responders.

Urban conflict in Syria has had devastating impacts on besieged civilians targeted by deliberate bombing and human rights abuses. Local actors, some with an overt humanitarian mandate, engage in first response activities, but often lack sufficient training, equipment and operationalisation. This mixed-methods research from four besieged urban areas finds a range of capabilities, understandings and mandates within six different sets of organisations involved in first response. This points to a strong evidence-base of the needs and strengths of organisations undertaking first response, and how external actors could better support them.

The seminar is on Thursday 1 March, 16.30-18.00, in the Student Hub, White Space, on the 3rd floor of the Abercrombie building. All welcome. This is the last in this semester's seminar series. Thank you for your support and we hope to welcome you to a new series in September.

From South Sudan to Oxford

Our Oxford Human Rights Festival is largely organized by students in the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP). Because of this we are fundraising for CENDEP scholarships to support amazing students like Betty to study at Brookes.

Identity: torturer

Richard Carver writes:

Look at this picture. Does it depict torture? Of course, it does. It is a representation of water torture in early modern Europe. This is the same in all essentials as so-called waterboarding,* one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the Central Intelligence Agency under the George W Bush administration and extensively documented by a subsequent Senate investigation. Waterboarding is torture.

This is not the blog post I originally intended to write today. (That one is on a much happier theme and I will post it tomorrow.) It is not directly about our work at CENDEP, but since Lisa Handley and I spent four years researching how to prevent torture, we could hardly not react to a major piece of news this week. One of our findings was that investigation and prosecution of torturers was a highly effective way of preventing torture. (We can reasonably infer the converse – that failure to investigate and prosecute will make the recurrence of torture more likely.)

Now consider this:

One declassified cable, among scores obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against the architects of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, says that chief of base and another senior counterterrorism official on scene had the sole authority power to halt the questioning.

She never did so, records show, watching as Zubaydah vomited, passed out and urinated on himself while shackled. During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah lost consciousness and bubbles began gurgling from his mouth. Medical personnel on the scene had to revive him.

(You can read the whole story here.)

The chief of base mentioned in this account was Gina Haspel, nominated this week by President Donald Trump to be the next director of the CIA. Some of her defenders purport to be shocked that “liberals” and feminists are not more excited that she is the first woman nominated to the post. Even without attending CENDEP’s workshop on intersectionality this week, we know that a woman who intersects with being a torturer is still a torturer.

Gina Haspel is by all accounts a criminal who has violated one of the strongest prohibitions of international law. She is a torturer (who compounded her crime by destroying evidence). She should be behind bars, not preparing for Senate confirmation hearings.

* So-called because waterboarding makes it sound like a fun holiday activity. The use of a board is not an essential part of the torture; near-drowning is.

Oxford Human Rights Festival begins today

Disability in humanitarian response

Supriya Akerkar writes:

Regardless of a country’s level of prosperity, people with disabilities and older people are the most affected in humanitarian crisis, facing disproportionate impacts. Even with positive frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and age and disability inclusion in the Sendai Framework of action for disaster risk reduction (2015-2030), there are adoption and implementation gaps that lead to discrimination and lack of assistance to older people and people with disabilities.

The Age and Disability Capacity Programme (ADCAP), funded by the US Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) has partnered with international development organisations to tackle these exclusions. CENDEP has been a research partner following the work of those organisations that have sought to ensure inclusion of older people and people with disabilities in humanitarian responses. The lessons from this project are captured in the recently completed Good Practice Guide: embedding inclusion of older people and people with disabilities in humanitarian policy and practice (2018, in press).

As part of the Oxford Human Rights Festival, there will be  a public seminar (1-2pm) and workshop (2-5pm) on 'Disability in Humanitarian Response' at Oxford Brookes University on 13 March. 

For the public seminar, Dr. Supriya Akerkar, Programme Coordinator MA Development and Emergency Practice and Senior Lecturer in Disaster Risk Reduction, will be sharing the main research learnings from the ADCAP's experience followed by a Q&A. She will be joined by Dr Richard Carver, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and Governance at CENDEP, who will be the discussant for this talk.

The afternoon workshop will have speakers from Christian Aid UK, Islamic Relief International UK and Help Age International UK. The speakers will reflect on their organisational experiences and also on what remains to be done further to embed disability inclusion in humanitarian responses.

We are hoping to welcome individuals and organisations interested or involved in development or humanitarian practice join us in the discussion. If this is of interest to you or your organisation then please sign up on eventbrite to join: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/disability-in-humanitarian-responses-tickets-43499857244. The public seminar will be held in the Glass Tank exhibition space in the Abercrombie Building and the afternoon workshop in room 128 of the John Henry Brookes building - both on the Gipsy Lane campus.

Mark International Women's Day with showing of Gulistan

Today (8 March) is International Women's Day and for this week's Work in Progress seminar we collaborate with the Oxford Brookes Documentary Club to show the film Gulistan.

You can read more about the film here: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/obu-documentary-club/screenings/gulistan--land-of-roses/

Note the time: we start at 19.00 and the showing is in the Main Lecture Theatre, John Henry Brookes building, Headington Campus.

For  more information on our Work in Seminar  series programme, check out this blog post: http://cendep.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/work-in-progress-seminars-all-welcome.html

The open society and its enemies

Richard Carver writes:

For an 87-year-old, George Soros has an extraordinary work ethic. Not content with trying to stop Brexit, he is currently engaged in secret manipulation of the survivors of the recent Florida school shooting and, with fellow billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, is working to bring about socialism in the United States. It may just be a coincidence that Soros is a particular bugbear of Vladimir Putin, friend of Donald Trump, the National Rifle Association and UKIP, but it is presumably not at all a coincidence that he, like Bloomberg and Steyer, is Jewish.

But all of this is by way of a preface to what is truly the nuttiest of all the anti-Soros claims, and one that is having a direct impact on some very good friends of CENDEP’s. George Soros was born in Budapest. He survived the war and Nazi occupation of Hungary by acquiring Christian identity papers and then emigrated, first to Britain and then to the United States. Much later, as a philanthropist, his own country of birth, still under Communist rule, was a focus of his giving. One Hungarian beneficiary of Soros’s support was a young democracy activist called Viktor Orbán, who received a scholarship to study at Oxford University.

Orbán is now, of course, prime minister of Hungary and, for several years, has been fighting a high-profile battle to effectively destroy Soros’s greatest contribution to post-Communist Hungary, the Central European University. If you imagined that any national leader would be proud to host one of the world’s premier academic institutions – well, you have much to learn about Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian leader aspires to an “illiberal democracy” on the Russian model. Membership of the European Union is some constraint on his actions; Russia has banned the Open Society foundations but Orbán has to move more stealthily (if not exactly subtly, as the illustrations below reveal).

"Soros would resettle millions from Africa and the Middle East"

All of which brings us to the latest attacks on Soros – and, more importantly, on Hungarian civil society and refugees. In January, the government published a package of laws under the heading “Stop Soros.” The claim behind this is that Soros was behind the flood of “illegal immigrants” into the country, with the intention of destroying Christian European civilization. (I am honestly not making this up.) Of course, there is no flood of immigrants. The large numbers of refugees who passed through Hungary in 2015 did just that – pass through – and the fact that they came to Hungary had rather more to do with the geography of central Europe than Soros’s ability to organize conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Don't let Soros have the last laugh" - implicit anti-Semitism supplemented

by explicit graffiti.

Orbán and his advisers, one assumes, know that all this is utter nonsense, just as the Tsarist secret police knew that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a forgery (in both instances because they were themselves the forgers). But there are plenty of people who take this perfectly seriously. Anti-Soros posters have been a staple in Hungary for a while and they are usually “improved” by the addition of anti-Semitic graffiti. The recent upping of tempo is presumably connected with the fact that Hungary has a general election in April. The actual target of all this is not Soros himself, but Hungarian civil society. The Stop Soros laws propose a 25% tax on grants to Hungarian organizations from foreign donors, as well as court orders against those who “organize illegal migration.” What is meant by organizing illegal migration is, for example, providing advice, support or legal representation to refugees seeking asylum. According to an official from the prime minister’s office, the goal of the legislation is to “have a debate about those (who support migration), and if they do not confess, the authorities should force this confession.” This presumably refers to a requirement that organizations supporting migration must register with the government or face prosecution.

And this is where we come to our friends. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) will be one of the worst affected of civil society organizations, as a consistent and highly effective advocate for refugees (and a recipient of Soros funds). The Helsinki committees date back to the 1970s and represent one of the best examples of citizen action in support of human rights. Lisa Handley and I have worked as partners of the HHC since 2013. First, members of the HHC conducted country research for our study of torture prevention and hosted our visit to Hungary in 2014. Then last year, Lisa provided support for the HHC on a research project on prosecution of torturers, and they hosted us again on a visit to study the use of immigration detention.

The response from the European Union so far has been weak. While there is, rightly, a very high bar for EU entry when it comes to human rights and the freedom of civil society, it appears that it never occurred to anyone that there might be retrogression once a state was in the EU. Illiberal Poland currently appears to Brussels as a bigger problem and, apparently, the EU can only deal with one problem at a time (although the European Commission has referred Hungary to the European Court of Justice). However, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (in concert with their Polish counterparts) has put forward a very practical interim solution: the creation of an EU fund to support civil society organizations. Such funding is normal for “third countries” (that is, non-EU members), yet does not exist on a long-term basis for civil society within the EU. This would be an essential lifeline to excellent organizations – and through them to the refugees who desperately need representation and support.

The last word goes to Michel Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders: “There is a need for European countries to be more coherent… not to teach human rights outside of Europe and then not respecting human rights inside Europe.” Quite.

Full disclosure: I have knowingly been in the pay of George Soros on at least three occasions – working for Human Rights Watch, ARTICLE 19, and the Open Society Justice Initiative. I am clearly working for the Elders of Zion and my views can be accordingly discounted.