The United Nations’ top official on torture has accused private manufacturers of developing ever more cruel ways to inflict pain in crowd control and individual restraint equipment, and called for an international ban on the multibillion-dollar trade in some common instruments of torture.
Alice Jill Edwards, the special rapporteur on torture, has presented the UN general assembly with a list of 20 items she wants to see banned as designed to be inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading. They include spiked batons, thumb cuffs, body-worn electric shock devices, sjamboks, gang chains and millimetre wave weapons, also known as heat rays.
