A/75/179 brain activity in regions associated with helping behaviour when people witness emergencies among others. 23 42. Passive bystanders tend to feel strong emotions of guilt and shame for failing to intervene and prevent torture or ill-treatment. The ensuing moral dilemma is suppressed by reference to the passivity of “everybody else”. In practice, internal and external bystander apathy is absolutely central to enabling torture and ill-treatment worldwide. 43. Importantly, once bystander apathy becomes normalized, those who dissent from passivity by denouncing immoral activity as active bystanders, whether they are described as “whistle-blowers”, “moral advocates”, “traitors”, “spies” or “dissidents”, tend to be socially sanctioned. 24 In practice, such “moral advocates” are often isolated and excluded by the passive majority, treated with contempt and self -deceptively perceived as traitorous, selfish, arrogant or insulting. 25 2. Displacement of responsibility 44. Displacement of responsibility always aims to absolve individuals, institutions or even entire nations of culpability by blaming others for the wrongful conduct. It is a very common initial reaction pattern in the context of investigations that are aimed at clarifying questions of accountability. In essence, displacement of responsibility can take three fundamentally distinct forms, namely: (a) “upward” or (b) “downward” displacement within a chain of command, hierarchy or other power structure or (c) “external” displacement through outsourcing to external actors. (a) “Upward” displacement 45. An almost standard reaction of officials accused of wrongdoing, whether by act or by omission, is to claim that they were “only following orders”. Bystander passivity and, in extreme cases, even active participation in torture and ill -treatment can indeed be the result of insurmountable personal distress and pure survival instincts, most notably in situations in which disobedient officials or intervening bystanders would be exposed to serious risks of reprisal or where victims are forced to torture each other. While such extreme circumstances may mitigate personal culpability, they can never legally justify (i.e., render lawful) any participation in or acquiescence to torture or ill-treatment. 26 46. Even outside such oppressive situations, however, humans tend to experience a significantly diminished sense of personal responsibility for harm and suffering inflicted upon instruction from authority figures. From a psychological perspective, when acting in obedience, the sense of duty, loyalty and allegiance of the perpetrators tends to take precedence over their sense of responsibility and empathy towards the __________________ 23 24 25 26 14/25 Ruud Hortensius and Beatrice de Gelder, “From empathy to apathy: the bystander effect revisited”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 27, No. 4 (August 2018), pp. 249 − 256; Bibb Latané and Steve Nida, “Ten years of research on group size and helping”, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 89, No. 2 (1981), pp. 308–324. Brian Martin, “Strategy for public interest leaking”, in Secrecy, Law, and Society, Martin Bray, Rebecca Scott Bray and Miiko Kumar, eds. (Oxford, Routledge, 2015), pp. 219 –233; Nadia Bashir, “Wielding a double-edged sword”; Lissa Johnson, “The psychology of getting Julian Assange: what’s torture got to do with it?”, New Matilda, 23 February 2019. See, in particular, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “UN expert says ‘collective persecution’ of Julian Assange must end now”, 31 May 2019 and the Special Rapporteur’s findings of 27 May 2019 in the case of Julian Assange (UA GBR 3/2019). Art. 2 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; Arts. 4 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “The official torturer: a learning model for obedience to the authority of violence”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 18, No. 13 (October 1988), pp. 1,107–1,120. 20-09728