In October 2000 an informal working group of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights met to discuss the latest drafts of an Optional Protocol to the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture. The Working Group itself met for its 9th session in February 2001 and its 10th session was held in January 2002.2 The primary purpose of this Optional Protocol is to create a new international mechanism that will have a preventive role and which would operate by conducting visits to states and to places of detention within states and, in the light of such visits, enter into a ‘dialogue’ with the state concerned in order to help them ensure that torture does not occur. The origins of this initiative lie in a proposal formally tabled in the early 1980s during the negotiations that led up to the adoption of the UNCAT itself but at that time it was clear that so radical a move as the establishment of an international body with an automatic right of entry into any place of detention would be unacceptable within the broader international community.3 However, the idea was taken up on a regional level within Europe and in 1987 the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which established the European Committee of the same name (known as the CPT), very much by way of an example to the rest of the world, or so it was thought.4
Criminalisation of Torture under the United Nations Convention against Torture