A Handbook on the Individual Complaints Procedures of the UN Treaty Bodies

Summary: OMCT has published a Handbook Series of four volumes, each one providing a guide to the practice, procedure, and jurisprudence of the regional and international mechanisms that are competent to examine individual complaints concerning the violation of the absolute prohibition of torture and ill-treatment. This Handbook on seeking remedies for torture victims through the individual complaints procedure of the UN treaty bodies is the fourth volume of the series.

Each act of torture and ill-treatment, inflicted by one human being upon
another, permanently scars all those touched by it and destroys our sense of
common humanity. The practice of torture is so fundamentally at odds with
the notion of civilized life that its legal prohibition is absolute: there exist no
circumstances whatsoever which justify its use. It is one of those few norms
under international law that has attained the status of jus cogens, sharing this
position with only a handful of other inviolable rules including the prohibition
of genocide and slavery.

Despite the absolute nature of the prohibition, it is a sad fact that torture and
other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment continue to occur in var-
ious places around the world. Sometimes ill-treatment occurs openly, but most
often it is deliberately hidden from public scrutiny, and perpetrators are readily
able to control and eliminate the evidence of their misdeeds. Indeed, one of the
purposes of torture and ill-treatment is to terrorise victims into silence so that
the crime never emerges into the open. This implies that all those who struggle
to end practices of torture, to ensure the right to a remedy for victims and to
ensure that perpetrators are punished often face especially difficult challenges.Notwithstanding these obstacles, the fight against torture and ill-treatment is
fuelled and strengthened by the courage of those who speak out against it.
These voices are critical to the struggle against torture and other forms of
ill-treatment because they remove acts of torture from the darkness and bring
them into the light, exposing them for what they are and seeking to hold those
who perpetrate them accountable.

I therefore welcome the publication of this Handbook written by eminent
experts on the work of the United Nations treaty bodies. Its laudable aim is to
assist individual victims of torture and their representatives in holding torturers
accountable, by facilitating access to processes available under international
human rights law. It focuses on the relevant procedures and jurisprudence of
three of the central United Nations human rights treaty bodies: the Human
Rights Committee, the Committee Against Torture, and the Committee on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

The individual complaints mechanisms of these treaty bodies empower an
individual to obtain from an international body redress and justice against a
State that has violated international human rights norms. These bodies thus
serve a critically important function in situations where domestic legal systems                                fail to hold perpetrators to account for their actions. This Handbook therefore
represents a crucial contribution to the struggle against torture and ill-
treatment worldwide, by providing practical information to victims and advo-
cates that will enhance and increase the utilisation of vital United Nations
mechanisms.

                            Manfred Nowak
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture
                             November 2006