Executive Summary The universal and absolute prohibition of torture has been established in numerous international and regional treaties, and all 57 participating States of the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe (OSCE) have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT). In their OSCE Human Dimension Commitments, they have explicitly and unequivocally pledged to uphold the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment and have committed themselves to strive for its elimination. The use of torture not only amounts to an egregious human rights violation in itself, but also leads to other serious human rights violations, including the violation of the right to a fair trial. The use of torture, and evidence obtained by torture, taints the entire criminal justice process, eroding the rule of law and public trust in the system’s ability to deliver justice. Across the OSCE region, however, the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (other ill-treatment) continues to be a problem in criminal justice systems. While torture is used for numerous, often intertwining reasons, some common aspects of domestic laws, policies, practices, and institutional and workplace cultures incentivize and facilitate its use by law enforcement officials and other criminal justice actors.1 A principal motivation for the use of torture by actors in criminal justice systems is the goal of obtaining evidence that will lead to more or more serious convictions. Accordingly, criminal justice systems that are overly reliant on the use of confessions as evidence incentivize the use of torture, especially by police. Overreliance on the use of confessions may sometimes be attributed to a lack of sufficient resources for adequate investigation; or may be the result of entrenched practices and mindsets that regard confessions as the ‘best” forms and means of evidence. When combined with a lack of training on investigative interviewing techniques and an absence of safeguards such as access to a lawyer or audio-visual recordings of interviews, police are incentivized to resort to torture and other ill-treatment to extract confessions. 1 The term “law enforcement officials” although larger in scope will be denoted as police throughout the document; other criminal justice actors include the judiciary, prosecution services or corrections as well as the relevant oversight bodies. 5