1.2.4 Duty to exclude statements obtained by torture or other ill-treatment – UNCAT Article 15 of the UNCAT provides: “Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.” 1 UN TREATY BODIES The effective prevention of torture and ill-treatment requires that any incentive to use such abuse to assist investigations be eliminated. The admissibility of statements made under such treatment, which are in any case inherently unreliable,89 must therefore be prohibited by law. This prohibition is absolute. While it is not among those explicitly mentioned in Article 16 as applying to other forms of ill-treatment, in light of the Committee’s approach to Article 16, it seems that the prohibition also applies to statements obtained as a result of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.90 Given the importance of the “purpose” element in the definition of torture, it seems likely that any form of prohibited ill-treatment leading to incriminating statements would in any case be classified as torture.91 The prohibition applies to statements made by the victim of ill-treatment concerning him- or herself, as well as statements made about third parties.92 It seems that the prohibition also encompasses derivative information or evidence, which includes information uncovered by following leads given in statements made as a result of torture.93 The CAT considers that this obligation derives from the absolute nature of the prohibition on torture, so when allegations are made that a statement has been obtained by torture, the State party has an obligation “to ascertain whether or not statements constituting part of the evidence of a procedure for which it is competent have been made as a result of tor For a summary of studies on the relative effectiveness of torture and other methods, see, for example, Jeannine Bell, “One thousand shades of gray: The effectiveness of torture”, Bloomington Legal Studies Research Paper No. 37, 2005, available at http://ssrn.com, which concludes that torture should not be relied upon over non-violent interrogation techniques, the effectiveness of which have been proven. 90 CAT, General Comment No. 2, §§3, 6. 91 See section 1.1.2.2, above. 92 P.E. v France, CAT Communication No. 193/2001, 21 November 2002. 93 See, for example, CAT, Concluding Observations on the UK, UN Doc. A/54/44, 1999, §76(d); CAT, Concluding Observations on Zambia, UN Doc. A/57/44, 2002, §3(b)(iii). 89 23