Torture
Torture is inherently cruel and unusual under section 12. As the Supreme Court wrote in Suresh v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) (2002), torture is "so inherently repugnant that it could never be an appropriate punishment, however egregious the offence." The Court noted that the "prospect of torture induces fear and its consequences may be devastating, irreversible, indeed, fatal." This view of torture goes back to R. v. Smith, in which Justice Lamer said that "some punishments or treatments will always be grossly disproportionate and will always outrage our standards of decency: for example, the infliction of corporal punishment."
In addition to violating section 12, in Suresh it was found that torture violates rights to liberty and security of person under section 7, and shocks the conscience. Therefore, Canada may not extradite people to countries where they may face torture.
Read more about this topic: Section Twelve Of The Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms
Famous quotes containing the word torture:
“I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“It is cruelty to children to keep five-year-olds sitting still, gazing into vacancy even for one hour at a time. We have little idea of the torture we thus inflict.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)