A Catalan psychiatrist, new UN rapporteur against torture

BarcelonaThe Catalan psychiatrist and researcher Pau Pérez Sales was appointed this Wednesday as the UN's special rapporteur on torture. He will thus become the world's leading authority on torture and other ill-treatment, with the responsibility of ensuring compliance with the Istanbul Protocol, which obliges governments to investigate and document cases of torture. Pérez Sales will therefore have to visit and engage with states, national and international institutions, and civil society organizations in order to formulate recommendations and present reports to the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. His appointment is exceptional due to his profile and comes at a critical time of questioning international law and multilateralism.

Traditionally, like his predecessor, Alice Jill Edwards, UN rapporteurs are jurists who approach their work from a legal perspective. In contrast, Pérez Sales is a forensic psychiatrist and for 30 years has developed an intense clinical, scientific, and teaching practice on the trauma caused by torture and organized violence. He has accompanied survivors and worked with truth commissions and forced disappearances in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Nicaragua, or Guatemala. From the Sira Centre in Madrid, an entity dedicated to the comprehensive care of torture victims which he directs, he has worked as an expert witness in the case of Julian Assange—founder of WikiLeaks imprisoned by the United Kingdom—, the Santa Bárbara massacre of 1991 at the hands of the Peruvian army, the use of rubber bullets by riot police in Spain, or the infiltrations of the Spanish police into social movements.

A new approach

Shortly after learning of the appointment, Pérez Sales explained to ARA how he approaches the new responsibility: "There are very few rapporteurs within the United Nations who do not belong to the legal world. My appointment signifies a certain commitment to a different perspective. For 40 years, the focus has been heavily on the legal perspective of torture, on the interpretation of the Istanbul Protocol and other legal tools. I want to bring the perspective of survivors, of victims, to the implementation of psychosocial tools."

The psychiatrist, trained at the University of Barcelona and currently directing a master's program at Complutense University in Madrid, approaches the next six years of his mandate aware that the moment is complex, with major powers shaping a new order that ignores international law and multilateralism. "Shared governance systems are being questioned, and this implies political, logistical, financial difficulties, etcetera," he admits. He also highlights that "at a particularly critical moment when discourse is highly polarized, we need to return to an approach based on evidence, on adequate documentation, and on trying to put science, evidence-based facts above political positions."

In this regard, he emphasizes the challenge posed by the impact of the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence on human rights: "Both with regard to individual and collective rights, new forms of coercion and purely psychological mistreatment are being developed, from interrogations to migration control or the identification of people in demonstrations, which are advancing faster than the responses we can conceive." They are, he notes, "weapons that go beyond classic physical torture." Indeed, Pérez Sales is an international benchmark in the study of psychological torture and so-called "torturing environments," the framework with which he describes how certain contexts, conditions, and practices can constitute mechanisms of torture or mistreatment.