Trump 2016

[freemehul]

The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which is currently in force since June 26, 1987, provides a broad definition of torture.

Article 1.1 of the UN Convention Against Torture reads:

thumbs up for you man :)

[Elldallan]

thumbs up for you man :)

Agreed, wish he'd have used one of the others though, because that definition has holes the size Scandinavia which you can get stuff through, more specifically "inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions", so if the laws of a country, say Saudi Arabia said an acceptable punishment was to whip somebody in public then that's not torture because it's "inherent or incidental to lawful sanctions", another hole would be if I was an organisation, say Al Qaeda and connected a car battery to somebody's testicles etc without the permission of government officials of the state I was operating in that's also, not torture under that convention.

I much prefer either:

For the purpose of this Declaration, torture is defined as the deliberate, systematic or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority, to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason.

or

Torture is the systematic and deliberate infliction of acute pain by one person on another, or on a third person, in order to accomplish the purpose of the former against the will of the latter.

Both scores bonus points for brevity. Of course there will be no meaningful international Conventions against torture as long as nations including but not limited to China, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc are still around, because their definition of "lawful sanctions" include things which any sensible human being(which apparently excludes Donald Trump & handofthrawn amongst others) would recognize as torture.