Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Nuanced U.S. position on torture?

Charlie Savage has a piece in The New York Times this morning: U.S. to Revise Bush Policy on Treatment of Prisoners. As a followup, John Bellinger at Lawfare has a piece on the meeting:
[T]he U.S. delegation appeared before the Committee Against Torture in Geneva today and announced a modest but important change in the U.S. Government position regarding extraterritorial application of Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture (which prohibits cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in “territory under U.S. jurisdiction”). At the same time, the U.S. delegation reaffirmed that U.S. military operations are governed by the laws of war, not the CAT, although the U.S. delegation carefully avoided using the fraught phrase lex specialis.

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