assurances against torture gained notoriety recently when U.S. officials acknowledged a large number of transfers of suspects to countries where torture is a serious human rights problem, claiming that U.S. authorities regularly sought and received diplomatic assurances of humane treatment from receiving governments prior to the transfers. In an increasing number of those cases, the suspects have credibly alleged that they were tortured. But the problem is much broader. The Canadian government’s “security certificate” regime permits deportations of alleged terror suspects to places where they are at risk of torture. To stem criticism in some of these cases, the government has sought assurances against torture from receiving states such as Morocco and Egypt. The December 2001 expulsions of two Egyptian asylum seekers from Sweden based on assurances against torture caused a national scandal after the men alleged that they had been tortured and ill-treated in Egyptian custody. The government of the United Kingdom recently proposed securing assurances against torture to transfer terrorist suspects to Algeria and Morocco, countries where persons labeled “terrorist” are routinely targeted for abusive treatment, including torture. Governments in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and Georgia have also sought assurances to effect extraditions to countries such as Turkey and Russia, where terrorism suspects are at heightened risk of abusive treatment in detention. The picture is not entirely bleak. As described below, some cases involving the reliability and sufficiency of assurances have come before courts in several different jurisdictions and some courts already are drawing the line and upholding the ban on sending people to torture. Still, there is great confusion even in the current court cases, reflecting insufficient appreciation of the dynamics of torture and of the hollow-shell that diplomatic assurances represent when applied in situations where there is a risk of torture and ill treatment. This report draws on new research collected over the past year and from Human Rights Watch’s April 2004 report “Empty Promises:” Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture to illustrate the bankruptcy of existing rationalizations for the use of diplomatic assurances in the torture context.1 It summarizes applicable international law, details the practical reasons why diplomatic assurances cannot be relied on in the torture context, and analyzes new cases from a number of jurisdictions in which courts have addressed the issue or are currently grappling with it. 1 Human Rights Watch Report, “Empty Promises:” Diplomatic Assurances No Safeguard against Torture, April 2004 [online] http://hrw.org/reports/2004/un0404/ (retrieved March 20, 2005). HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOL. 17 NO. 4(D) 4