When the United Nations' top anti-torture official tried to inspect an infamous prison in Gambia two years ago, officials there denied him access. So he protested all the way up the country's chain of command.
In a tense meeting with members of the Cabinet of the country's autocratic ruler, the U.N. official, Juan E. Méndez, was again denied, this time with a jeering dismissal. "They said, 'Why don't you go to Guantánamo instead,'" recalled Mendez, a former U.N. special rapporteur on torture.
In Bahrain, officials were a little more subtle, but the message was the same, as they twice canceled prison inspection visits. "They said we face the same threats to national security as other countries face," Mendez said. "It was clear they were referring to the United States, and they didn't feel that they needed to give me access."
Now, after President-elect Donald Trump's campaign vows to reinstate the sort of torture used in the Bush-era war on terrorism — and to fill the Guantánamo Bay prison with "some bad dudes" — human rights experts fear that authoritarian regimes around the world will see it as another green light to carry out their own abuses.
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A return to such "enhanced interrogation" — and even to techniques that Trump has pledged will be "much worse" — would also send a powerful message just as nations around the world have begun to examine their own past abuses to ensure that they will not be repeated.
"Sometimes we see progress, and then we see swing-backs," said Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the secretary-general of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, a Denmark-based umbrella organization for anti-torture groups.
"When the U.S. was engaging in torture, that created an enormous swing-back of the pendulum," he added. "There were a lot of officials in other countries during the Bush administration who were saying, 'The Americans are doing it, so why can't we?' Now, with Trump saying, 'I will bring a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,' you can imagine how far we could go backwards."
Nils Melzer, who succeeded Mendez as the U.N. special rapporteur on torture in November, warned that if the Trump administration revived the use of torture, the consequences around the world "would be catastrophic."
A fragile consensus against torture, said José Miguel Vivanco, the regional director for the Americas for Human Rights Watch, could be shattered "when you have the White House openly advocating for torture."
During the campaign, Trump declared that "torture works," and he vowed to "immediately" reinstate techniques like waterboarding because "we have to beat the savages" of the Islamic State, who "deserve" such treatment even if it is fruitless. Since the election, Trump has indicated that he might be reconsidering his position, citing the firm stance against torture by James N. Mattis, his Pentagon nominee.
In an interview with The New York Times in November, Trump said that he was "surprised" when Mattis told him that he opposed torture and instead favored more humane interrogations of prisoners based on rapport building.
But Trump did not close the door entirely. If Americans feel strongly about bringing back waterboarding and other tactics, he said, "I would be guided by that."
Nora Sveaass, a psychologist at the University of Oslo and a former member of the U.N. Committee Against Torture, warned that if Trump revived the use of torture by the United States, it would have a ripple effect around the globe. "The U.S. is a very strong voice," Sveaass said.
"It's just like putting a bomb into all of those major principles — the absolute prohibition on torture; the absolute obligation to provide redress and justice to victims of torture, including rehabilitation; the obligation to investigate and hold people to account," she added. "If one country such as the U.S. openly torpedoes those principles, you can just forget about asking for compliance from states already challenging the absolute prohibition."
The signal from Trump that torture is acceptable again comes just as countries from Argentina to Tunisia, either through courts or special truth commissions, are engaged in tentative efforts to hold themselves accountable for past conduct.
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In Argentina, Omar Graffigna, the 90-year-old former chief of the country's air force, was sentenced to prison in September for the 1978 kidnapping and torture of two left-wing activists, Patricia Roisinblit and José Manuel Pérez Rojo. The prosecution of Graffigna was just one in a series of old cases that have been brought into the courts this year in Argentina, as the nation comes to grips with the legacy of its "dirty war" of the 1970s and early 1980s.
In Tunisia, a new Truth and Dignity Commission held its first hearings in November, allowing torture victims to tell their harrowing stories before a national television audience. The commission was created to investigate torture and other human rights violations dating to 1955, primarily by the regime of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, who was deposed during the Arab Spring in 2011.
And in December, Bolivia's legislature voted to create a truth commission to investigate torture, murders and other crimes committed by a series of authoritarian regimes from 1964 to 1982.
Even in countries that have not conducted such wide-ranging investigations, new grass-roots anti-torture organizations have begun to take root, and those groups are trying to make it more difficult for their governments to continue to engage in torture with secrecy and impunity.
Samuel Herbert Nsubuga, the chief executive of the African Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, based in Uganda, said anti-torture legislation that the country passed in 2012 had still not been put into effect.
When the law finally takes effect, "our challenge will be to bring some people to trial in Uganda for torture," he said. In the meantime, his group has enlisted doctors and psychologists to provide medical help and therapy to torture victims, as well as lawyers to provide legal advice.
But the moves toward examining past abuses are so far limited to relatively small nations or countries where the focus is on historical events rather than the current use of torture. The inquiries are also often being conducted in the face of strong resistance from top government officials, who oppose aggressive investigations even of past crimes. Those modest efforts could face sharp setbacks if Trump brings back banned practices.
"I am afraid that Trump's government will question the basic values of the international order, and torturing people will be justified," said Carlos Jibaja, a psychologist with CAPS, a group in Lima, Peru, that helps victims of torture.
At the same time, Trump's advocacy of torture may encourage some major countries, like Russia and the Philippines, to be even more open and aggressive in their use of torture.
Olga Sadovskaya, the vice chairwoman of the Committee Against Torture, a human rights group in Russia, said that torture was already common in the country. She noted that Russian prison and police officials routinely used torture tactics with cruel nicknames, such as the "President Putin," which involves attaching wires from an office telephone to a victim's body and then running electric current through it. The police like that tactic, she said, because it does not leave marks.
Edeliza Hernandez, the executive director of the Medical Action Group in the Philippines, an organization that documents cases of torture and provides treatment and rehabilitation, estimated that there were 200 political prisoners in detention centers in the country, and said that most of them had been tortured.
"The government has soldiers watch us while we inspect prisoners," she said.
Melzer, the U.N. official, warned that if Trump followed through on his pledges, more countries would follow his lead and get back into the torture business.
"What kind of message would that be to the world?" Melzer asked. "It couldn't be worse. What happens to the role of the United States as an example in the world, and what would that mean for the policies of other states? If the United States does it, those other countries will know they can get away with it. The last thing the world needs is a U.S. president legitimizing this."