ABSTRACT
For many in the West, the Soviet collapse seemed to represent the global ascendancy of a liberal vision of universal human rights. Spartacists and Caesarists voice the position of two camps increasingly at odds with each other, each believing themselves to be the representative of the more authentic human rights position. A new human rights mechanism was instituted in 1998, the International Criminal Court. This chapter first addresses the issue of security rights versus torture, then turns to the debate over humanitarian intervention, next to the effort to implement human rights from above and below, including reflections on new global compacts. By the sixteenth century the classical doubts about the reliability of testimony extracted via torture began to mature into a straightforward rejection of the practice. The ticking time-bomb fable also suggests the quiet heroism of those who, defying moral norms and legal conventions, choose torture.
