Our Origin
The International Coalition to End Torture was established in 2003, in the period following Amnesty International's End Torture campaign, with its general secretariat in Geneva. The Coalition emerged from a recognition that ending torture requires coordinated, sustained pressure across governments, legal systems, and civil society, pressure that no single organization can generate alone.
Today, the Coalition unites more than 100 member organizations across all regions of the world. Together, they monitor detention facilities, advocate for treaty ratification, train national human rights institutions, and document abuses that might otherwise remain invisible.
Our Mission
The Coalition's mission is to raise awareness of human rights and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, ensuring that governments, police, judiciary, and civil society know the law, demand its enforcement, and defend the individuals it is designed to protect.
The Convention Against Torture entered into force in 1987 and now has 176 States parties. Its Optional Protocol (OPCAT), adopted in 2002, creates a system of independent inspections of all places of detention. The Coalition has advocated for universal OPCAT ratification since the Coalition's founding.
Core Values
- Independence: the Coalition receives no government funding and takes no instructions from states.
- Accuracy: Our documentation is fact-based, sourced, and meets international evidence standards.
- Universality: The prohibition of torture admits no exception: not national security, not cultural practice, not emergency.
- Accountability: Perpetrators must face justice; impunity is itself a form of ongoing harm.
- Prevention: The best response to torture is preventing it through independent monitoring and systemic reform.
Our Activities
The Coalition works with state authorities, police institutions, judiciaries, and international human rights bodies. Our activities include media campaigns, direct-appeal advocacy, archival research, parliamentary lobbying, detention monitoring training, and support for National Preventive Mechanisms established under OPCAT.
The Coalition supports implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights' framework for the prohibition and prevention of torture in Africa, which the African Commission adopted in October 2002 following a workshop convened with the Association for the Prevention of Torture.
Why no one is named on this site
The Coalition does not publish the names of the people who run it, and it does not publish a governance page listing individuals. That is a decision, not an oversight, and this section exists so that readers know it was made deliberately.
The Coalition documents the conduct of governments. Some of those governments detain the people whose cases appear here, and several of them have documented records of acting against their critics. Naming the people who do this work would expose them, and would expose the people who talk to them, to retaliation. The protection is not for the Coalition’s comfort. It is for the safety of people who have already lost a great deal.
What the Coalition does publish is everything a reader needs in order to check the work rather than trust the people doing it. Every designation names the sources it rests on. Every court decision carries its citation and a link to the record. The test for a designation is set out in full, so that any reader, including a government that carries one, can see whether it has been applied correctly. Corrections are published.
Anonymity for the people, and an open record for the evidence. Anyone who believes something here is wrong is invited to say so, and will be answered.