Satisfaction, regret ... and hope.

• Author: Rodley, Sir Nigel
• Position: Rights Watch - Leaving the post of Special Rapporteur on the question of torture

I look back on my nearly nine years as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on the question of torture with mixed feelings. Fortunately, one I had when I tendered my resignation to the Chair of the Commission, namely, a sense of guilt induced by not completing my current (final) term of the mandate, has passed. The mandate was not due to expire until 2004, but I felt I could not continue to sustain responsibility for the work on it, as well as membership of the Human Rights Committee, and my continuing duties as a Law Professor. However, the appointment of Theo Van Boven, the distinguished former Director of the then Division of Human Rights, permitted guilt to be replaced by relief, as I could be confident that the mandate was in the hands of someone who would bring authority and commitment to its fulfilment. The remaining emotions are contradictory ones of satisfaction, regret and hope.

In 1984/1985, as the Head of Amnesty International's legal office, I had been responsible for that non-governmental organizations (NGO) campaign to create a procedure to deal with torture, based on the precedents of the Commission's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance, and its Special Rapporteur on summary and arbitrary executions. I delivered the organization's call at its 1985 session for the creation of the function. At the time, the notion that I might be responsible for it one day was inconceivable--it simply did not cross my mind. So when Peter Kooijmans, the first holder of the mandate (now a judge on the International Court of justice), resigned to become Foreign Minister of the Netherlands in 1992, it was amazing to find myself--by then a full-time law teacher--being put forward for, and eventually appointed to, the post. Of course, my predecessor, who as Head of the Dutch delegation to the Commission in 1985 had led the political effort to secure adoption of the mandate, had alrea dy put it on a secure footing.

The satisfaction for me lay in the opportunity to consolidate and develop it. This involved clarifying some conceptual questions and making some methodological adjustments. For example, on the conceptual side, I maintained my predecessor's stance of intervening in cases of sentences of corporal punishment being handed down. This was challenged by one State early in my tenure as being outside the mandate, and I developed at some length in the following report to the Commission the doctrinal...