ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the evolving contestation over Sweden's anti-torture policies in the periodic reviews by two key monitoring bodies: the UN Committee against Torture (CAT) and the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT). It accounts for how Sweden gained its reputation of being a pioneer in combating torture through domestic and foreign policy activism from the 1960s to the 1980s. Next, the chapter introduces the analytical framework for identifying discursive struggles in human rights treaty body reviews of Sweden. It analyzes reviews by the CAT and the CPT, respectively, and state party reports and responses, from the 1990s through the 2010s. When the Committee against Torture reviewed Sweden for the first time in 1989, its COs represented the peak manifestation of the international discourse of Swedish exceptionalism.
