The "sufferings" of the crime of torture

Main Article Content

Rodrigo Silva Medina

Keywords

Torture, criminal law, suffering, individual autonomy, dignity.

Abstract

The Colombian Constitutional Court abolished the word “severe” from the legal definition of torture in 2005. As a result of that decision, torture was formulated as “physical or mental suffering” in Colombian criminal law. Nevertheless, the actual legal definition of the term is so broad that it opens the door to confusion between torture and other similar crimes. This misconstruction is problematic in the scope of the criminal law, where the rule of law is especially important. This paper proposes a solution.

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