Theo van Boven: “During my visit Spain tried to sell me the idea that torture was fiction”

Theo van Boven, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, believes that for torture to disappear from police stations, incommunicado detention must be ended and that whenever there is a complaint, an enquiry must be conducted by independent bodies
Kristina Goikoetxea – MAASTRICHT

Theo van Boven (Voorburg, the Netherlands, 1934) has spent forty years working to protect human rights. For many years he headed one of the UN’s Human Rights bodies before his appointment as the Special Rapporteur on Torture until last year. He now lectures at the University of Maastricht, where he gave this interview. On the invitation of the {HYPERLINK \l ""}PP Government he visited Spain and the Basque Country in 2003 to examine whether torture was taking place. The report he published a few months later confirmed that torture did take place and Aznar’s government conducted a fierce campaign against him. He will be in Barcelona next week to participate in the seminars on preventing torture.

About 30 years working in support of human rights. Are abuses of human rights on the increase?

I’ve been working in support of human rights for 40 not 30 years. My first UN Assembly was in 1962. At that time I was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands. The situation? A difficult question to answer. You often think the situation is getting worse, but maybe it isn’t true. The thing is we have so much information nowadays and more opportunities to know what’s going on on the other side of the world.

So having information or not is important, isn’t it?

Of course it is. In the 1960s there was a tremendous massacre in Indonesia at a time when communism was being targeted and at the Ministry it did not spark off any controversy at all. Later, in the 1970s the same thing happened over the genocide issue in Cambodia. And again there was no controversy. Everything was silenced by the great powers. And what about what happened in South America? For example here in Europe we knew very little about what was going on in Argentina. Unlike today the information did not reach everywhere. But today there are still some very black spots on the map and we do not yet know all we should know about them. That is why I find it very difficult to say whether the situation has got better or worse.

Was the attack on the Twin Towers a watershed in human rights abuse?

The fight against terrorism has become the main focus. Now there is a tendency in the world to think that anything goes in the fight against it: torture, secret flights. –I believe that happened in the past, too. In Guatemala, Salvador– In the past it was in the name of Communism and now it’s in the name of terrorism. But if human rights are abused in the fight against terrorism, that is a victory for terrorism. The challenge should be to fight terrorism while at the same time respecting human rights. (…)