A/75/179 victim. The tendency to prioritize obedience over moral concerns has been observed, inter alia, in executioners carrying out the death penalty and in perpetrators of torture, as well as in genocidal events. 27 While destructive obedience to authority is an extremely dangerous human tendency, its effects can be superseded very effectively through the presence of an overriding superior authority, such as an effective system of external oversight and accountability that reliably prosecutes and punis hes wrongful conduct even when it has been authorized by superiors. (b) “Downward” displacement 47. Displacement of responsibility also works in the opposite direction, namely when superior officials delegate torture and ill-treatment “down” the chain of command to their subordinates and suppress their own moral dilemma by “washing their hands of the dirty work”. In practice, superior officials may express implicit expectations towards their subordinates – such as “find out what they know!” or “you know what to do with them!” – which, in the circumstances, may be predictably conducive to torture or ill-treatment, without, however, giving explicit instructions to that effect. 48. As a matter of law, such “downward” delegation of torture and ill-treatment cannot absolve the delegating superior, who remains criminally liable either as an instigator or under command and superior responsibility, nor does it diminish State responsibility for the wrongful conduct. From an evidentiary, moral and psychosocia l perspective, however, “downward” displacement of responsibility confers a self deceptive sense of plausible deniability, which is often gratefully adopted by the political leadership, the media and the public, such that abuses are conveniently blamed on “bad apples” or “rogue actors”, whereas broader investigations concerning superior responsibilities are avoided. To enable “downward” displacement, strategies of denial of knowledge regarding the infliction of harm have been identified among authorities, including “concerted and deliberate ignorance” of the details of abusive acts. 28 (c) “External” displacement 49. Plausible deniability is further strengthened by displacing the blame onto external “proxy perpetrators”, such as private contractors, mercen aries, organized criminals, insurgents and even other States. The deliberate outsourcing of torture and ill-treatment to non-State actors or other States can be a conscious policy of disguising the legal responsibility of States. As a strategy of moral dis engagement, however, “external” displacement of responsibility does not necessarily imply that the wrongful conduct is deliberately planned or encouraged, but that the moral dilemma arising from its occurrence is suppressed by blaming external actors and, thus, rendering it “out of sight, out of mind”. 29 50. Contexts in which plausible deniability is routinely used to deny State responsibility for torture and ill-treatment include civil wars in which States train __________________ 27 28 29 20-09728 Laurent Bègue and others, “Personality predicts obedience in a Milgram paradigm”, Journal of Personality, vol. 83, No. 3 (June 2015), pp. 299–306; Herbert Kelman and Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (Yale University Press, 1989); Michael Osofsky, Albert Bandura and Philip Zimbardo, “The role of moral disengagement in the execution process”, Law and Human Behavior, vol. 29, No. 4 (September 2005), pp. 371–393; Ervin Staub, “Obeying, joining, following, resisting, and other processes in the Milgram studies, and in the Holocaust and other genocides: situations, personality, and bystanders”, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 70, No. 3 (September 2014), pp. 501–514. Ruth Jamieson and Kieran McEvoy, “State crime by proxy a nd juridical othering”, The British Journal of Criminology, vol. 45, No. 4 (July 2005), pp. 504–527. Ibid. 15/25