Law professor M. Cherif Bassiouni wanted listeners to do more than just think about torture during his Mar. 30 speech.

“What I’d like to do is something totally unacademic, and that is to get you to have a feel, not a thought, of the subject,” his said in front of 70 people in the McCormick Tribune Forum. “Torture is nothing more than the debasing of the human being.”

Bassiouni is a professor of law at DePaul University and president of the International Human Rights Law Institute. His speech was the keynote address of the NU Conference on Human Rights.

He began his career in human rights activism at age 21, working in the office of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. There, Bassiouni was put on house arrest for seven months after he raised objections to the vice president about photographs of torture passed around the office.

Listen to Bassiouni describe the photograph of torture.

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“The fear of the intimation of torture and the idea that this would happen to me was the equivalent of torture,” said Bassiouni. “The whole world shank to me bed in my bedroom. I wouldn’t even dare go out.”

Twenty years later in 1977, Bassiouni became co-chair of the committee that drafted the United Nations Convention against Torture, adopted in 1984. He insisted that psychological torture be added to the definition of torture.

But Bassiouni said the issue of torture recently became reopened. Now, Bassiouni said, law professors like former Justice Department adviser John Yoo are advocating that governments circumvent the Constitution, ignore the Geneva Convention and commit moral atrocities by interpreting law to justify torture.

Bassiouni said his mission now is to raise awareness of America’s actions and policies with regards to torture, which he believes forebode worse moral wrongs.

“[The United States] that has championed the rule of law and due process, that has consistently accused dictatorial regimes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and others of engaging in the barbaric acts of torture, has suddenly subverted the rule of law,” Bassiouni said.

However, Bassiouni said there is hope for the United States. He said the American people need to speak up about the America’s wrongs.

“Everyone is capable of being a hero in a small way,” Bassiouni said.

Listen to Bassiouni speak about what people can do to help.

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