Dr Silvia Casale, Expert on Torture Prevention

Throughout her long and distinguished career, Dr Silvia Casale has inspected hundreds of detention facilities across scores of countries, leading visiting teams to monitor conditions and prevent the torture and ill-treatment of detainees.

“I think I’m a bit addicted to custodial settings,” she says with a smile. “But it’s one of those areas where, when you start to work, you see how huge the need is and how far we have to go.”

The aim of these preventive visits is both simple and profoundly challenging: to enter into a dialogue with the authorities to bring about practical, sustained improvements for people held in places of detention.

“There’s inevitably a gap between what the law says should happen and what really happens – and preventing torture is about narrowing the gap,” says Dr Casale.

“So you’ve got to know where the gap is, where the boundaries are for that particular State and for that particular place that you’re visiting. There’s no substitute for actually being there and looking.”

Preventive visits

A visit to a detention facility, says Dr Casale, starts as soon as she steps through the door and engages all her senses. Very often the first thing she will notice is the smell of fresh paint on the walls.

“You’re also listening. Is it too quiet? Not a good sign, ever. Is it really, really noisy? And you’re looking. How do people – staff and prisoners – relate to each other? These are things that you get a feel for as you take that initial temperature of the establishment,” she says.

It is a role that requires members of the visiting team to understand how closed institutions operate “because they’re unlike any other institution of the State and they have their own dynamic.”

“And within the team you also need people who are clear about the human rights perspective and the preventive focus of the work. The aim is not to try and uncover the skeletons in order to start blaming people and accusing.”

However, private and confidential interviews with detainees, which are an essential part of each visit, can “uncover things that are really very grim.”

“One of the really encouraging things is how many people will very selflessly put themselves at a degree of risk, in terms of going over things that are very painful to talk about, because they really want it to be better for somebody else,” says Dr Casale.

The issues identified during the visit become the starting point for an ongoing dialogue with the authorities, including both the positive aspects that could be replicated and the problems that should be addressed.

“You find that people in closed institutions very often don’t have much of a chance to talk about these things so they can actually be quite appreciative of the opportunity to constructively discuss the issues.”

Promoting OPCAT

Born in England and trained as a criminologist, Dr Casale has served in a number of high-profile posts. She was Chairperson of the UN Subcommittee for Prevention of Torture and a long-standing President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

Late last year, with support from the APF and the Association for the Prevention of Torture, Dr Casale visited Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand to take part in discussions about how countries can implement their obligations under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT).

According to Dr Casale, the “added value” of OPCAT is that it creates an independent national body to monitor places of detention, known as a national preventive mechanism.

“International bodies, like the UN Subcommittee, can help … but even with the best will in the world, an international organisation can’t really visit regularly and do the preventive work that a national preventive mechanism can do,” she says.

“Visiting needs to be done by people who are on the ground. National bodies have a permanent presence, they understand the context and, if they are independent, they can do a tremendous amount of good. They can really make things change.”

Fostering change

Despite facing many confronting situations during her years of visiting places of detention, Dr Casale continues to be motivated by a deep-seated conviction that change can and does occur.

“Some of it is dramatic – really from one day to the next – but those are the simple things,” she says.

“Some change takes years to come to fruition but, when it does, it means that something has shifted and it’s done so in a sustainable way. When that happens, it is a tremendously heartening experience.”

She believes that people working across a range of fields – government, law enforcement agencies, civil society groups and national human rights institutions – have a responsibility to be agents of positive change.

“Because our societies are, in a way, defined by how we deal with the people in our closed institutions, the people whom we remove from society for one reason or another,” she says.

“If we want our societies to be based on the rule of law, to be democratic and to really respect human rights, then we need to narrow the gap between who we say we are and what we really do. It can’t just be window dressing.”