Registering Time in Recognising Torturous Harm: Figuring the Single, Plural and Historical in Torture's Adjudication

Abstract

How does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment? With a view to international human rights adjudication, this article offers a kaleidoscopic reading of temporal logics (registers and reasoning) operating in the contemporary anti-torture cause and jurisprudence. Time, it is found, plays an important albeit at times implicit role in how judges imagine and evidence torturous harms brought before them. This article explicates and singles out time as a factor. It finds that, whilst indeterminacies and ambiguities persist, singular (and spectacular) or plural (and prolonged) harmful acts and impacts operate to serve adjudicators’ reasoning, variably (and intuitively) to find violations or to divert from doing so. Time thus works as a device of inclusion and exclusion.