‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’ (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). It is difficult to think of an imperative that has appeared as often or for as long in the texts of advocates and activists as the prohibition of torture. Its normative force, or at least its promise, has become a bulwark against the excesses of State violence. As that violence and the perceptions thereof have changed, so has the prohibition or, more precisely, the interpretation of its constitutive categories: torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. An impressive apparatus has been built to give effect to it: legal principles and processes, anti-torture organisations, national preventive mechanisms and scholarship across disciplines have all proliferated. Stories to emerge from the contemporary anti-torture struggle are vast and varied, neither linear nor solely legal, neither celebratory nor altogether devoid of optimism—rendering taking stock difficult. In his recent book, Lutz Oette leads the way.

The book consists of eight chapters including an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 commences with the debates on the absolute nature of the prohibition, revisiting arguments advanced in favour of its necessity in ‘ticking bomb’ scenarios or in the name of ‘civilizing’ colonial populations in Algeria under French occupation, in Northern Ireland under the British army and in relation to detained Palestinians by Israel. This exposition highlights the mobile potency of torture's perpetration and denial, namely that States borrow and repurpose practices from other States to conceal their reliance on torture more effectively. Chapter 2 canvases the conventional and emergent interpretations, identifying the politically charged conceptual exercise on what type of violence is to be included and how that is then to be categorised in a manner that is not, as it too often has been, ‘formulaic and casuistic’ (260). Chapter 3 conceptualises ‘discriminatory torture’ as a means to understand ‘growth conditions’ better, ie the circumstances which allow torture to flourish. Vulnerability and intersectionality have a long history in directing attention to discrimination but without sufficient theoretical depth in the anti-torture field, particularly on gender, race, disability and age. For Oette, the reluctance in speaking to differences in the characteristics of victims has ‘obscured, or risks obscuring, differential exposure to and experiences of torture’ (95). Chapter 4 traces the development of State obligations regarding prevention, accountability and reparation. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the prohibition's application in international criminal law, international humanitarian law and international migration law. Chapter 6 changes tack to speculate on the future evolution of the prohibition, particularly in relation to the Internet, the environment, poverty, healthcare and new weapons technologies, asking whether the prohibition ought to be mobilised in these contexts.

Oette accounts for the prohibition's changing complexion and its capacity to respond to its context, noting developments such as: ‘increasingly sophisticated’ standards (around custodial safeguards, non-coercive interviewing, torture-tainted evidence, preventive monitoring, and positive State obligations to investigate, prosecute and redress torture and other ill-treatment) as well as jurisprudence and scholarship on its gendered and psychological dimensions; the centring of victims, partially displacing its State-centrism; discrediting attempts in the United States to narrow the interpretation of torture; and the increased scrutiny of carceral and counter-terrorism regimes. He argues that whilst the prohibition stands unwithered on its surface (that is, still absolute in nature, allowing no exception), it has been weathered. Its recent challenges have risked adding ‘shades of grey to what should be the monochrome picture of the absolute prohibition’ (17), signalling a precarious malleability.

Oette thus does more than merely trace doctrinal developments. This history also overlaps with Oette's own professional involvement with the anti-torture movement, having worked as a lawyer at London-based non-governmental organisation Redress. His reflections are not of celebration but of complication. Constructively committed to the anti-torture cause, the book is fuelled by a fundamental question: how could torture be more adequately understood and addressed in the future? Oette's call is for a broadening to account for colonial, political, structural, intersectional, relational and situational dimensions currently rendered marginal. What remains unclear, however, is what can be expected from the law. Case law has sketched out avenues for expansion. Yet how much of this can genuinely be expected to transform the dominant perspective? How much faith ought to be vested in new standards on non-coercive interviewing without structural changes having been made? Does the proliferation of such standards encourage pyrrhic victories? Can advocates and adjudicators respond to the demands of activists and academics? Can adjudicators do more, and be more ‘conceptually grounded, contextual, and culturally informed’ in interpreting the prohibition? Can torture prevention be more structural, situational and empirically informed?

Oette reflects upon his gradual realisation that believing in the ‘power of law was at best simplistic because law itself forms part of contestation and change and may play an ambivalent if not a problematic role’ (vii). The law—criminal law as well as human rights law—fails on multiple fronts to reflect realities in a fundamental manner as it ‘constitutes a language of governance rather than an authentic response to human suffering’ and the prohibition ‘simultaneously outlaws, categorizes, and obscures if not legitimizes, by way of exclusion, forms of direct or structural violence’ (48). At his most cutting, he accepts that ‘the prohibition also became part of the civilizing mission’ in certain hands, that its normative elaboration should not ‘be equated with automatic progress’ and that ‘even where this process results in enhanced protection, it risks being partial, privileging certain experiences and marginalizing others’ (141). There is ambivalence, as Oette himself admits, as to what role the law can play. Despite continued, though cautious, commitment to the law (admitting that he writes ‘as someone who (still) believes in the practical and symbolic value of the law and legal interventions but is also keenly aware of their limitations’ [9–10]), this remains an unresolved tension. These questions, here and more generally, may well remain perennial.

This panoramic take on the transformation of the prohibition is far from a celebratory account of the law or those who wield it to facilitate the eradication of torture. Oette's vision is rare amongst legal scholars on torture: it is personal and committed but simultaneously cautious in assessing dominant paradigms. It is accessible, instructive and persuasive, with its pleas propelled by a poetic and prosaic style. In conclusion, this book is a gift to those navigating the ‘law and torture’ maze for the first time or those otherwise wanting to reflect on the subject.