A/75/179 Punishment). Like all other methods of moral disengagement, utilitarian justification is not a valid legal defence, but a strategy of self-deception aimed at avoiding or suppressing the moral dilemma arising from the inherent wrongfulness of an y practice of or acquiescence to torture or ill-treatment. 47 57. Reflecting a rationale of “the end justifies the means”, utilitarian justifications seek to morally legitimize torture or ill-treatment as a “necessary evil” to achieve a purportedly more important purpose. Utilitarian justification denies neither the occurrence of torture or ill-treatment, nor individual, institutional or national responsibility for its occurrence, but suppresses the resulting moral dilemma by denying the wrongfulness of such practices owing to specific circumstances. The utilitarian purposes that are claimed to justify torture and ill-treatment depend on the context, but generally involve one or several of the basic aspects of self -interest. (a) Security, self-defence and self-preservation 58. The need to defend against threats to individual or public security is the predominant utilitarian basis upon which torture and ill -treatment are justified. The infamous legal memorandums of the Department of Justice of the United Sta tes defining detainees in the “war on terror” as “unlawful combatants” to whom the protections of the Geneva Conventions did not apply are a well -known example of a Government trying to remove legal barriers to a utilitarian justification of torture. 48 In that case, the objective of defending against terrorist threats by extracting information aimed to justify the use of “enhanced interrogation” methods. Although the unlawfulness of that interpretation has been subsequently acknowledged by the Government of the United States, polls conducted 10 years after the attacks of 11 September 2001 indicate that the official narrative of utilitarian justification appears to have persisted in the public mind, with more than 70 per cent of respondents from the United States viewing the torture of terrorism suspects as warranted in 2011. 49 Similarly, the Supreme Court of Israel has invoked the “necessity defence” to exempt interrogators from prosecution, noting that the use of so -called “pressure techniques” was warranted by grave suspicions suggesting that the victim was involved in terror activities. 50 59. Utilitarian justifications based on security and defence are particularly effective in achieving self-deceptive moral disengagement because they instrumentalize powerful emotions of fear arising from basic survival instincts. Examples of publicly disseminated narratives aimed at justifying torture as a necessary means include slogans such as “waterboarding works”, 51 the so-called “ticking bomb scenario” and sanitized depictions of life-saving torture in mainstream entertainment, but also political narratives demonizing certain minorities, migrants and other marginalized groups as “thugs”, “criminals”, “terrorists”, “traitors” and “parasites”, among other things. In pract ice, __________________ 47 48 49 50 51 18/25 Monica Luci, Torture, Psychoanalysis, and Human Rights; Susan Opotow, “Moral exclusion and torture: the ticking bomb scenario and the slippery ethical slope”, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 13, No. 4 (2007), pp. 457–461. Karen Goldberg and Anthony Lewis, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Manfred Nowak, “What practices constitute torture? US and UN standards”, Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 28, No. 4 (November 2006), pp. 809–841; Milan Markovic, “Can lawyers be war criminals?”, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, vol. 20, No. 347 (2007), pp. 346–369. Andrew Pilecki and others, “Moral exclusion and the justification of U.S. counterterrorism strategy: Bush, Obama, and the terrorist enemy figure”, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 20, No. 3 (August 2014), pp. 285–299. Communication AL ISR 7/2018 of 31 January 2018 and the response by the Government of Israel of 4 May 2018. See Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Torture is torture, and waterboarding is not an exception – UN expert urges the US not to reinstate it”, 30 January 2017. 20-09728