Torture’s Bureaucracy and the “Legitimacy Effect”

A new publication by Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir published in the Cambridge University Press in collaboration with Pacti.

This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. Read More