Guest Blogger: Jayne Stoyles

We are delighted to welcome Jayne Stoyles (left) as today's guest blogger.
Jayne is a lawyer, the first Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice, and an Ashoka Canada Fellow. A decision issued recently in a human rights case in which CCIJ has submitted a friend of the court brief forms the core of her guest post below.
Prior to joining CCIJ, Jayne served for several years as the Program Director of the NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court in New York, a global network of 2,000 NGOs that helped bring about the establishment of the Court and that was twice nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize during her tenure. She: was also a Senior Adviser to the Institute for Global Policy in New York on issues of human security, UN reform and international justice; provided International Humanitarian Law training for the Red Cross; and taught international law at Carleton University in Canada.
Jayne has spent time in Africa, Latin America, and a First Nations community in northern Canada with a variety of volunteer placements, including working with Centro de Derechos de Mujeres in Honduras on updates to the criminal code from a gender perspective. She is the 2010 winner of the Walter S. Tarnopolsky Human Rights Award and of the Lord Reading Law Society Human Rights Award, was named one of Ottawa’s Top 50 People in 2008 by Ottawa Life Magazine, and has been featured in Canadian legal magazine The Precedent and in the on-line Charity Village Spotlight. She has just accepted a position on the Board of Directors of the International Institute for Criminal Investigations, an international organization of professional investigators, lawyers and academics dedicated to the training and deployment of professionals for the investigation of atrocities. Jayne regularly speaks, writes and provides media interviews about the making of the ICC and international justice issues from a Canadian perspective.
Like Pam Spees, Valerie Oosterveld, and Mary Hansel before her, Jayne would like to dedicate her IntLawGrrls contribution to the beloved Rhonda Copelon.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest blogger: Mary Hansel

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Mary Hansel (right) as today's guest blogger.
Mary is a litigation attorney and Legal Fellow with the International Center for Transitional Justice, where she has focused on issues of U.S. accountability for torture and other detainee abuses.
She received her B.A. in Psychology from Vassar College and her J.D. from the University of Southern California Law School. She then earned her LL.M in Public International Law at the London School of Economics; Professor Christine Chinkin supervised Mary's dissertation.
Mary has published several scholarly articles on international law and human rights. She recently contributed a chapter for the forthcoming book Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice (Intersentia, 2011), to be edited by Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University in Atlanta, and Dr. Estelle Zinsstag, Director of the Africa Justice Project at the Oxford War Crimes Centre.
In her guest post below, Mary surveys jurisprudence that supports recognizing domestic violence as torture. She dedicates her post to Rhonda Copelon, already an IntLawGrrls foremother. Copelon's work, Mary writes,

broadened my thinking on women’s rights.

Heartfelt welcome!

Domestic violence as torture

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

Recently, reports of detainee abuse in the “war on terror” have dominated the international legal discourse on torture. This focus on detainee abuse, however, should not obscure developments concerning the most common and pervasive form of torture: domestic violence.

Last summer, a landmark judgment for victims of domestic violence, Opuz v. Turkey (2009), was handed down by the European Court of Human Rights (below right). The Court found the Republic of Turkey liable for torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, because local officials had failed to prevent and redress the abuse of Nahide Opuz and her mother by Opuz' husband. The Court concluded that the state’s response to the abuse “was manifestly inadequate to the gravity of the offences in question,” in spite of noting that the Turkish authorities “did not remain totally passive” and that “ill-treatment must attain a minimum level of severity if it is to fall within the scope of Article 3.” Turkey was ordered to pay Opuz 30,000 euros in compensation for violating Articles 2, 3, and 14 of the European Convention.

For years, human rights bodies have recognized that state failures with respect to domestic violence can amount to torture. An example is General Comment No. 2 - Implementation of article 2 by States parties, issued in 2008 by the Committee Against Torture.

The ECHR decision in Opuz, however, seems to mark the first time that an international or regional court has held a state accountable for domestic violence, between partners, under a theory of torture — thus establishing the justiciability of the concept. Yet this aspect of the holding has received surprisingly little media attention.

The lack of coverage may be partially due to the fact that, as IntLawGrrl Stephanie Farrior pointed out in a prior post, the Opuz judgment was also remarkable in other respects, including its acknowledgment of domestic violence as a potential form of gender discrimination.

Women’s rights advocates have been pushing for greater recognition of domestic violence as a breach of international human rights for decades, and have made enormous jurisprudential strides. Seminal cases such as Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras, decided in 1998 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (left), helped establish the concept of state accountability for transgressions by non-state actors. Moreover, the traditional view that domestic violence is inherently a family matter beyond the purview of the state has been challenged by cases like Bevacqua and S. v. Bulgaria, rendered by the European Court of Human Rights in 2008.

As a result, state failures to prevent and redress domestic violence can now be understood to violate a range of human rights. The late Rhonda Copelon (right), to whom I have dedicated this post, explained in early 2009:

The next step in this legal and cultural revolution is to treat gender violence as torture. So far, rape — in war, by the state and where the state does not take measures against it — has been acknowledged in international law as an act of torture. Domestic violence — the most private and most common of all forms of gender violence — is on its way.

The Opuz holding is an important milestone in this regard.

The benefits of a “torture” designation are manifold, and have normative as well as practical value in enhancing legal protections for domestic violence victims:

► These victims of stand to gain from the jus cogens status of the prohibition of torture. It confers a heightened level of international condemnation and sends a clear message that domestic violence is an unqualified violation of human rights.

► Another benefit is the resultant availability of the protections and complaint mechanisms that exist for torture. These can bolster international legal protection for victims of domestic violence.

► A third benefit is the synergistic effect of combining the efforts and resources of advocates focused on feminist issues with those of international human rights generalists.

As Copelon articulated:

Simply recognizing domestic violence as torture will not solve the problem of domestic violence. But . . . it will help make domestic violence a front burner issue, hastening both the impartiality, adequacy and appropriateness of official responses and the cultural revolution that demands absolute and unconditional condemnation of such violence.

Accordingly, as the world laments the mounting evidence of torture perpetrated in the “war on terror,” the same sense of indignation and urgency must be extended to the private torture that countless people endure on a daily basis.