Q&A: Juan Méndez, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture

Juan Méndez is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment and a prominent leader in human rights advocacy. He sat down with The Daily Princetonian to talk about how he first became involved in human rights advocacy, his current priorities in the prevention and abolition of torture and advice for aspiring human rights advocates.

Daily Princetonian: How and when did you first become motivated to serve as a human rights advocate?

Juan Méndez: As a law student in Argentina, I — together with other friends — we tried to do a little bit of public service, giving free legal advice to shantytown dwellers and to union members. But then as soon as I graduated, my country was having a military dictatorship with quite a bit of unrest, and so I started defending political prisoners. I continued to do that for five years or so in Argentina, until I was myself arrested and tortured and held in administrative detention without trial. Then, when I came out of Argentina, I was adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience, so I made contact with them as soon as I could. And then I started doing some volunteer work, mostly in Argentina — eventually, I was really lucky that I was able to do it as a kind of a professional calling.

DP: How did your experience as a torture survivor change you?

JM:A lot of people in my same situation were tortured in Argentina — some much worse than me. So when you know that this is a collective problem ... then you understand why it happens and you try to fight against it by protecting others from being tortured and also by trying to set up policies and institutions that prevent torture from happening. I can’t say that there’s a moment in which I changed because of that, because it was always kind of a continuum.

DP: What qualities, both professional and personal, have you found necessary to be a prominent leader in human rights advocacy?

JM:First and foremost: empathy — being able to understand not only intellectually but emotionally the plight of people who suffer human rights violations. It’s very easy otherwise to see so many cases, one after another that you become numb and you feel that you’ve heard it all before. But it’s important to be able to not let that overcome your instincts about empathy. I also think we need to have a warm heart for victims and a free-thinking mind in order to find the proper channels to help people because it’s not enough to empathize — you need also to be effective in what you do.

DP: Of all the positions you’ve held, which one do you feel allowed you to make the most impact? What positive changes have you helped to initiate?

JM: It’s difficult to separate, because what I enjoyed the most was going into the field, and talking to people, and gathering their testimony. Whether that had a lot of impact or not, it seemed at the time that it was useful, and I also learned a lot.

In terms of impact ... I would say my work with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seemed to have more impact because it had more resonance, and you actually do get to meet heads of states, ministers, etc. You have doors open to you that you don’t have when you’re doing non-governmental work.

I think the same can be said about what I’m doing now — Special Rapporteurship on Torture. Even though states are not bound by what we say, the flag of the United Nations carries a lot of weight. We’re always wondering whether what we do is effective or not. But you get a lot of support from the fact that victims and their families reach out to us and ask us to do things.

DP: When limited resources, personnel and so on force you to tackle only one among many possible human rights issues, what do you do?

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JM: Nowadays, my mandate is narrow. I can only deal with torture and cruelly inhumane and degrading treatment, which is narrow but not too narrow, because it encompasses a lot of things.

I think that the fight against torture is particularly meaningful for me because I’m the first Special Rapporteur who was actually tortured, but also because torture is the outside manifestation of the violation of all rights, because states torture because they want to clamp down on people who are fighting for everyone else’s rights. Helping to curb it, or at least to lessen it, also opens up doors for others to work and struggle on behalf of other rights and other peoples.

DP: Which human rights issues do you think are most pressing for the international community to address?

JM: The threat of terrorism and the fact that there’s agents that commit this practice that cannot be beholden to a state. But also, I’m afraid that the reaction of well-established states to terrorism, the knee-jerk reaction to fight terrorism by betraying our own principles, is a threat to human rights everywhere. And I would say, the use of military means [that] also don’t fully respect the obligations under the laws of war, means that we recreate the conditions for terrorism rather than helping suppress it.

DP: What would your advice be to college students interested in serving as human rights advocates?

JM:I would definitely encourage them to use opportunities to work during the summers ... or between the undergraduate and the graduate level, in the field. But I would also say very strongly that you need to continue your education, your training. You need to prepare yourself both academically and professionally — not only because it’s a very competitive field, but also because we owe it to the victims of human rights abuses to bring to bear in support of them everything that we can learn and every skill that we can acquire.

DP: What issues are you currently working on and most passionate about?

JM:In the Rapporteurship on Torture, for example, we’re about to publish a report on the gender-specific ways in which women and girls, but also LGBT people, experience torture and inhumane treatment. We hope that it will be a good contribution to understanding that torture may be the same for everybody, but the way people experience it means that we also have to have separate remedies for them.

Of the several thematic reports that we’ve published, I’m particularly proud of the very first one that I wrote, which was about solitary confinement. It has given me the chance to revisit the issue permanently, to learn more about it and to participate in actions ... to try to highlight the enormity of solitary confinement and to have some practical ways of limiting it.