States have the obligation to protect individuals from infringements by other private persons and to guarantee public security. In order to fulfill this task they have a comprehensive set of tools at hand, including the monopoly on the use of force, the police, and the penitentiary system through which States may restrict certain rights and freedoms of the individual for the purpose of protecting the public. As is the case in nearly all areas of societal coexistence, this raises questions regarding the legitimacy and proportionality of the mutual relations between individual freedoms and collective needs.

While interferences with freedoms and rights might be legitimate and necessary in the light of public security, they can in some cases directly touch upon human dignity of the individual. Therefore, such measures can only be applied in specifically regulated and exceptional situations or – in some cases - not at all; and they have to be continuously monitored. In the context of these considerations, the BIM team “Human Dignity and Public Security” (HuDi) works on combating and preventing torture and the protection of human rights of persons in detention.

Based on a long standing practical experience in monitoring places of detention world wide, as well as on extensive theoretical knowledge about the international and national legal frameworks governing the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment in the broadest sense, the HuDi team is mainly concerned with the following questions:

• Which measures contribute to the eradication and prevention of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment?
• How can human rights of detainees be protected?

The HuDi team regards the complex phenomenon of torture and other forms of ill-treatment, which primarily but not exclusively concerns persons who are deprived of personal liberty, from a holistic and interdisciplinary point of view in order to tackle it effectively. These approaches entail, inter alia, effective investigations into allegations of ill-treatment based on sound legal provisions criminalising torture, the gathering of forensic evidence of torture, procedural safeguards for detained persons, such as the right to a lawyer or to inform family members of arrest, as well as the establishment and functioning of internal and independent external monitoring mechanisms as foreseen by the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture (OPCAT); furthermore, the right of torture survivors to rehabilitation constitutes another important element in this context.