Announcements

Items posted here are intended to be of particular relevance to subscribers and contributors to the Torture Journal. For more general news items on torture victims, please go to www.irct.org.

  • Call for papers - New technologies and coercion: Rethinking torture and ill-treatment in the digital age

    2026-05-22

    This call for papers accompanies the editorial New Technologies and Coercion: A Framework to Rethink Torture (Pérez-Sales, 2026), which proposes a framework for understanding how digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnological systems are reshaping the production of coercion, suffering, and control. The editorial argues that torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment do not end where screens begin — that surveillance, algorithmic targeting, digital exposure, and behavioural manipulation can generate severe and persistent harm to individuals and communities in ways that existing legal and clinical frameworks are only beginning to address.
    We invite contributions from researchers, clinicians, lawyers, human rights practitioners, and survivors across disciplines and regions. Papers may be empirical, conceptual, legal, or clinical in orientation, and may address individual cases of digitally mediated harm — such as intimate partner surveillance or targeted harassment — as well as collective, structural, or state-level forms of coercion. Interdisciplinary work and submissions from practitioners in the field are especially welcome. Papers will be selected based on relevance, methodological rigour, and contribution to advancing debate. Authors wishing to explore the suitability of a paper before submission are welcome to contact the Editor-in-Chief at pauperez@runbox.com.

    Please find the full description of the call for papers here: Call for Papers - New technologies

    Read more about Call for papers - New technologies and coercion: Rethinking torture and ill-treatment in the digital age

  • Call for papers - The Charter of Rights of Victims and Survivors of Torture: towards implementation

    2026-05-22

    In March 2026, the Charter of Rights of Victims and Survivors of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (A/HRC/61/42) was presented to the Human Rights Council by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. Shaped entirely by survivors’ experiences and voices — through three years of regional hearings in Bogotá, Nairobi, and Kathmandu, and more than 120 submissions from survivors worldwide — the Charter sets out seven core rights and calls on States, international organisations, civil society, and rehabilitation practitioners to adopt it as a framework for action. The Survivors’ Charter gives formal expression to what they have long articulated: that justice, rehabilitation, and prevention are not separate tracks but deeply interconnected, and that no meaningful progress is possible without survivors playing a central role in all responses. The Charter goes a step further, by being written by survivors and sets out their demands. Torture Journal invites contributions that engage directly with the Charter and with survivors’ rights and experiences — examining its foundations, assessing its de-mands and concepts against clinical and empirical realities, exploring opportunities and obstacles to implementing it in different spheres (government, civil society, internation-al organisation, or by sectors – medical, legal, economic or social), and asking what it demands of practitioners, legal systems, and institutions. We invite contributions from survivors, survivor-led organisations, researchers, clinicians, lawyers, and human rights practitioners, across disciplines and regions. Papers may be empirical, conceptual, legal, or clinical in orientation. Interdisciplinary work and submissions from practitioners in the field are especially welcome. Papers will be selected on the basis of relevance, methodological rigour, and contribution to advancing debate. Authors wishing to explore the suitability of a paper before submission are welcome to contact the Editor-in-Chief at pauperez@runbox.com.

    Please find the full description of the call for papers here: Call for Papers - Charter of Rights

    Read more about Call for papers - The Charter of Rights of Victims and Survivors of Torture: towards implementation

  • CALLING FOR PAPERS!

    2022-06-13

    Submission guidelines and links

    For more information

    Contact Editor-in-chief (pauperez@runbox.com) if you wish to explore the suitability of a paper.

    About the Torture Journal

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    Read more about CALLING FOR PAPERS!