About the Institute for the Advancement of Justice & Human Rights

The Institute for the Advancement of Justice & Human Rights (IAJ) is an independent non-governmental organization, organized under Paris Principles standards, for the comprehensive monitoring, investigation, and documentation of human rights violations by domestic authorities across the full range of human rights obligations binding on the United States — by ratification, by signature, and under customary international law.

The IAJ’s mandate is as broad as the obligations it monitors. It investigates human rights violations across all settings of official conduct — including, but not limited to, judicial processes, family courts, and child protective services; immigration enforcement, border operations, and immigration detention; the relationship between the United States and Indigenous peoples and nations; law enforcement and administrative agencies; and historic programs of state-sponsored human experimentation, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra program, whose obligations of investigation, disclosure, and redress remain unfulfilled.

The IAJ applies the Istanbul Protocol (2022) — the international standard for the investigation and documentation of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment — as its medico-legal investigative standard, and applies the full range of applicable treaty and customary standards as its legal standard. It reports its findings to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, UN Special Procedures, the Universal Periodic Review, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and other competent international bodies, through the procedures available to civil society organizations.

The IAJ is a California 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation (EIN 99-2887013), entirely independent of government funding and direction.

To understand what the IAJ is — and why the precision of its institutional design matters — it is necessary to understand what it is not, and why that distinction is the foundation of its credibility before international bodies.

National Human Rights Institutions: What They Are, Why They Matter, and Why the United States Has None

Under international human rights law, a National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) is a body established and empowered by the state — through constitutional provision, legislative enactment, or executive decree — to promote and protect human rights independently of the government that created it. NHRIs are neither government agencies nor NGOs. They occupy a distinctive third space: conferred with state authority, yet required by their founding instruments to operate independently of state control.

The international criteria for NHRIs were established in 1993 by UN General Assembly Resolution 48/134, which adopted what are known as the Paris Principles. The Paris Principles specify that an NHRI must: have a mandate as broad as possible covering all human rights; be independent of government and financially autonomous; have the power to investigate, report, and make recommendations; reflect the diversity of the society it serves; maintain transparent complaint procedures open to the public; and publish its findings.

The breadth-of-mandate requirement is the Paris Principles’ most fundamental substantive requirement. An institution whose mandate is limited to a single treaty, a single category of rights, or a single population cannot fulfill the NHRI function — because human rights are indivisible and interdependent, and because the persons whose rights are violated typically hold rights under multiple treaty frameworks simultaneously. A detained asylum seeker, a Native family facing child removal, and a survivor of state-sponsored experimentation are each protected by overlapping obligations that no single-treaty body can see whole.

International recognition of NHRIs is administered by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI). GANHRI “A status” accreditation grants an institution procedural standing before the United Nations that civil society organizations do not hold: A-status NHRIs may sit separately from NGOs at UN treaty body sessions, submit independent reports, and participate in Universal Periodic Review procedures in their own right. “B status” grants observer access. Civil society organizations participate through different, more limited channels.

The United States does not have a GANHRI-accredited NHRI. It does not have any institution that meets the Paris Principles criteria. Proposals to establish one have been made and ignored for decades. This is not a bureaucratic gap. It is a structural compliance shortfall under the international legal obligations the United States has accepted.

The IAJ’s Institutional Position: An NGO Organized Under Paris Principles Standards

The IAJ does not claim to be an NHRI. It cannot be one, because NHRI status requires state action — legislative or constitutional — that only government can provide. No organization, however independently structured or methodologically rigorous, can self-accredit as an NHRI. To claim otherwise would misrepresent the Paris Principles framework.

What the IAJ claims — and what it demonstrates through its institutional conduct — is more precise and more important in the current U.S. landscape: the IAJ is an NGO organized under Paris Principles standards, operating by Istanbul Protocol methodology, performing in institutional practice the functions that a Paris Principles–compliant NHRI would perform for the United States, in the continuing absence of any such institution.

International human rights scholars and practitioners describe institutions in this position as “shadow NHRIs” or “functional NHRI equivalents” — civil society organizations that work in the space left by a state’s failure to establish the independent human rights body its international obligations contemplate. That literature is candid that such a body is no substitute for a state-established, internationally accredited NHRI; the IAJ shares that view, which is why it disclaims NHRI status throughout. What the IAJ offers instead is independent documentation built to international standards. UN treaty bodies and the OHCHR recognize that civil society plays a critical role in treaty monitoring and routinely receive and rely on civil society information — including where a state fails to report. The OHCHR’s Handbook for Civil Society confirms that where a state has not reported for an excessive period, committees may consider the situation in the absence of a report, and that civil society actors can contribute information to that review.

The IAJ’s design is intentional and precise. It is organized as a Paris Principles body because it intends to demonstrate — through its methodology, findings, breadth of mandate, and communications with competent international bodies — what an independent national institution would find and require of the U.S. government on questions of human rights and international-law compliance. The demonstration is itself the institutional purpose.

Why the Absence of a U.S. NHRI Is Itself a Treaty Compliance Failure

The United States ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992 and the Convention Against Torture and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1994. These instruments impose obligations — including effective prevention (UNCAT Article 2), prompt and impartial investigation (UNCAT Article 12), accessible complaint mechanisms (UNCAT Article 13), redress and rehabilitation (UNCAT Article 14), effective remedies (ICCPR Article 2(3); ICERD Article 6), and confidential inquiry authority (UNCAT Article 20) — that presuppose the existence of institutions capable of independent investigation without deference to the state being assessed.

The Istanbul Protocol requires that investigations be conducted by bodies independent of the state whose conduct is being assessed. That requirement goes unmet across the settings the IAJ examines. Judicial conduct cannot be examined against international standards without the judiciary’s own permission or cooperation. Oversight of immigration enforcement and detention is housed largely within the department whose conduct is at issue. The federal government’s trust relationship with Indigenous nations places it in the position of investigating itself. And the historic experimentation programs of the national security agencies were examined, where at all, by the political branches, with records the agencies themselves had destroyed.

The U.S. government has repeatedly assured the Committee Against Torture that existing domestic mechanisms provide equivalent protection. The Committee’s 2014 Concluding Observations (CAT/C/USA/CO/3-5) disputed that assurance. The IAJ’s 500 complaint registrants (as of March 26, 2026) since August 4, 2025 (commencement of intake) provide empirical indication that domestic mechanisms do not provide relief, remedy, or accountability.

What the IAJ Investigates

The IAJ’s mandate extends to any human rights violation by official conduct, in any setting, under any obligation binding on the United States. It sets its investigative agenda on the basis of complaints received, evidence gathered, and the gaps in accountability that its mandate requires it to address, and that agenda will continue to develop as new complaints and evidence arrive.

The areas described below are among the IAJ’s current and developing lines of investigation. They are illustrative, not exhaustive: they indicate the breadth of the IAJ’s work, not its limits. Whatever the setting, each matter is analyzed against every applicable treaty framework and conducted to the same methodological standard.

Judicial Processes, Family Courts, and Child Protective Services

The IAJ’s initial intake has been dominated by complaints concerning family courts and child protective services — coercive parent–child separation, denial of medical care, procedural weaponization, retaliation for assertion of legal rights, and denial of disability accommodation. From that intake the IAJ has identified 24 systemic factors of official conduct plausibly constituting torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, described below. This work continues, and it is where the IAJ’s analytical framework on non-custodial official harm has been most fully developed.

Immigration Enforcement, Border Operations, and Immigration Detention

The IAJ investigates human rights violations arising in immigration enforcement and removal, at the border, and in immigration detention, including facilities operated under government contract. Its areas of concern include conditions of confinement and medical neglect in detention; deaths in custody; solitary confinement and other restrictive housing; the detention of children and the separation of families; arbitrary and prolonged detention; the treatment of asylum seekers; and removal to countries where persons face a real risk of torture or other irreparable harm.

Immigration detention is detention in the conventional sense. It falls squarely within the anti-torture framework and within OPCAT Article 4(2)’s definition of deprivation of liberty, without need for the IAJ’s argued jurisdictional-custody analysis. The applicable obligations include the absolute prohibition of torture and CIDT (UNCAT Articles 1 and 16; ICCPR Article 7), the prohibition of refoulement (UNCAT Article 3; the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, to which the United States acceded in 1968), the rights of all detained persons to humane treatment and to freedom from arbitrary detention (ICCPR Articles 9 and 10), procedural protections against arbitrary expulsion (ICCPR Article 13), the protection of family life and of children (ICCPR Articles 17, 23, and 24; CRC Articles 3, 9, 22, and 37), and freedom from racial discrimination (ICERD Articles 5 and 6). The IAJ’s Unified Framework on parent–child separation applies with equal force to separations effected through immigration enforcement.

The Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The IAJ investigates violations of human rights affecting American Indian and Alaska Native peoples and Native Hawaiians where those violations engage the United States’ human rights obligations. Its areas of concern include the removal of Indigenous children from their families, communities, and cultures, including compliance with the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act and the continuing consequences of the federal Indian boarding school system; violence against Indigenous women and girls, including missing and murdered Indigenous persons and the jurisdictional gaps that leave those cases uninvestigated; the protection of lands, waters, sacred sites, and cultural life; and the application of free, prior, and informed consent to decisions affecting Indigenous peoples.

This work sits at the point where Indigenous rights and general human rights obligations overlap. The applicable framework includes ICERD, as interpreted by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in General Recommendation No. 23 (1997) and applied to the United States through its early warning and urgent action procedure; ICCPR Article 27 and the Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 23 on the rights of minorities to their culture; the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, under which the Inter-American Commission has found the United States in violation in respect of Indigenous land rights; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the United States endorsed in 2010; and, where their elements are engaged, UNCAT and the CRC.

The IAJ conducts this work with respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous nations. It does not investigate on behalf of an Indigenous nation or community without that nation’s or community’s consent, and it seeks to work alongside tribal governments, Native organizations, and survivors rather than in their place.

State-Sponsored Human Experimentation: MKUltra and Related Programmes

The IAJ is investigating MKUltra — the Central Intelligence Agency’s program of behavioral and chemical experimentation on human subjects, authorized in 1953 — together with its predecessor and successor programs. Subjects were exposed to drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other techniques, frequently without their knowledge or consent, through research conducted at universities, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions. In 1973 the Agency ordered the program’s records destroyed. What is publicly known derives largely from the congressional inquiries of 1975 to 1977 and from a cache of financial records that survived the destruction order.

Nonconsensual medical and scientific experimentation is expressly prohibited by the second sentence of ICCPR Article 7, and the Nuremberg Code established the requirement of voluntary consent a decade before the program began. The IAJ’s concern is not only with the historic acts but with the obligations that continue after them: to investigate, to establish and disclose the truth, to identify and acknowledge victims, and to provide redress and rehabilitation (UNCAT Articles 12 to 14; ICCPR Article 2(3)). Those obligations are informed by the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (General Assembly Resolution 60/147) and the Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity, which recognize the right of victims and of society to know the truth about past violations. The IAJ receives accounts from survivors, their families, and persons with knowledge of these programs.

Cross-Cutting Concerns

Across every matter it investigates, whether or not it falls within an area described above, the IAJ examines discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, disability, sex, and Indigenous identity; retaliation against persons who assert their rights; the treatment of children; and the absence of effective remedy. These are not separate programs. They are the lenses through which every case is read.

The Breadth of the IAJ’s Human Rights Mandate

Consistent with the Paris Principles’ requirement that a mandate be as broad as possible covering all human rights, the IAJ investigates violations across the full range of obligations binding on the United States — whether by ratification, signature, or operation of customary international law. The IAJ does not limit itself to any single treaty, category of rights, population, or institutional setting.

• Convention Against Torture (UNCAT) — Ratified 1994 Prohibits torture and CIDT by public officials where the five Article 1 elements are satisfied: act, intentionality, severity, official capacity, and enumerated purpose. The text contains no setting qualifier. Article 3 prohibits return of any person to a state where there are substantial grounds for believing they would be in danger of torture. Articles 12 to 14 require prompt investigation, effective complaint, and redress, obligations that continue for as long as they remain unmet. The IAJ’s legal framework establishes on five independent grounds that UNCAT’s prohibition extends to judicial, family court, CPS, law enforcement, and administrative conduct, in addition to its conventional application to immigration and other detention.
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) — Ratified 1992 Protects the right to life (Art. 6); prohibition of torture, CIDT, and nonconsensual medical or scientific experimentation (Art. 7); freedom from arbitrary detention (Art. 9); humane treatment of all persons deprived of liberty (Art. 10); procedural protection against arbitrary expulsion (Art. 13); fair trial and equal access to justice (Art. 14); family life and the protection of children (Arts. 17, 23, 24); freedom of expression and petition without retaliation (Arts. 19, 25); equal protection (Art. 26); and the cultural rights of minorities and Indigenous peoples (Art. 27).
• International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) — Ratified 1994 Prohibits racial discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of national or ethnic origin, in the administration of justice and in all official conduct (Art. 5), and requires effective remedies (Art. 6). ICERD is the principal ratified treaty protecting Indigenous peoples in the United States, and it applies directly to discriminatory patterns in immigration enforcement, CPS conduct, family court separation orders, and the judicial treatment of pro se litigants.
• Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees — Acceded 1968 Binds the United States to the substantive obligations of the 1951 Refugee Convention, including the prohibition of refoulement (Art. 33) and the prohibition of penalties for irregular entry by refugees (Art. 31). The prohibition of refoulement to torture is also absolute under UNCAT Article 3 and customary international law.
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) — Signed 2009, not ratified The U.S. is bound by its signature under VCLT Article 18 not to defeat the treaty’s object and purpose. Art. 13 requires effective access to justice; Art. 14 addresses deprivation of liberty; Art. 15 prohibits torture, CIDT, and nonconsensual experimentation against persons with disabilities; Art. 17 protects integrity of the person. Denial of disability accommodation in judicial proceedings or in detention simultaneously engages UNCAT, the ICCPR, and the CRPD.
• Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — Signed 1995, not ratified The U.S. is the only UN member state not to have ratified the CRC. Its core protections — the best interests of the child (Art. 3), the right to maintain family relations (Arts. 8–9), protection of refugee and asylum-seeking children (Art. 22), the right of Indigenous children to their culture (Art. 30), and the prohibition of torture, CIDT, and arbitrary deprivation of liberty (Art. 37) — reflect standards the United States is bound not to defeat and, in significant part, customary international law.
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) — Signed 1980, not ratified Art. 2 requires elimination of discrimination in public and official life; Art. 15 guarantees equal rights in courts and tribunals; Art. 16 addresses family rights. Gendered patterns in family court conduct, and violence against Indigenous women and girls, are within the IAJ’s areas of investigation.
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) — Signed 1977, not ratified The right to health (Art. 12), social security (Art. 9), adequate standard of living (Art. 11), and participation in cultural life (Art. 15) are implicated by official conduct that causes physical harm, strips persons of resources, denies medical care in custody, or severs communities from their lands and cultures.
• United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — Endorsed by the United States 2010 Although a declaration rather than a treaty, UNDRIP articulates the minimum standards for the survival, dignity, and well-being of Indigenous peoples, many of which restate obligations binding under ICERD, the ICCPR, and customary law. These include self-determination, free, prior, and informed consent, protection against forcible removal of children, and redress for the taking of lands and cultural property.
• Jus Cogens and Customary International Law The absolute prohibition on torture is a peremptory norm of general international law binding on the United States regardless of treaty ratification, reservation, or declaration. The International Court of Justice has confirmed its erga omnes character. The prohibitions of racial discrimination and of refoulement to torture, and the requirement of free and informed consent to medical experimentation recognized in the Nuremberg Code, form part of the same body of customary obligation.
• The UN Charter — Articles 55 and 56 Obligate all member states to take joint and separate action to promote universal respect for human rights for all. Documentation of systematic violations for which no domestic remedy exists constitutes evidence of Charter non-compliance alongside specific treaty breach.
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — Ratified 1988 The Genocide Convention establishes the prohibition of genocide as a treaty obligation supplementing its jus cogens status, and forms part of the framework of absolute, non-derogable prohibitions within which UNCAT obligations are interpreted and applied. Its recognition in Article II(e) that the forcible transfer of children of a protected group is among the prohibited acts informs the IAJ’s analysis of historic and continuing Indigenous child removal. The IAJ does not make determinations of genocide; it documents facts and identifies the legal frameworks competent bodies may apply to them.
• OPCAT (Optional Protocol to UNCAT) — Not signed or ratified by the United States The Optional Protocol establishes a system of preventive visits to places of detention and provides in Article 4(2) the authoritative functional definition of deprivation of liberty: “any form of detention or imprisonment or the placement of a person in a public or private custodial setting which that person is not permitted to leave at will by order of any judicial, administrative or other authority.” The United States’ non-ratification is itself a compliance gap: OPCAT’s National Preventive Mechanism represents exactly the kind of independent oversight of prisons, immigration detention, and other custodial settings the IAJ exists to provide in its absence. Article 4(2) is also treaty authority for the IAJ’s jurisdictional-custody framework.
• The Inter-American System — OAS Charter obligations accepted Although the United States signed but has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, it is a founding member of the Organization of American States and is bound by the OAS Charter’s human rights obligations. The United States has not, however, accepted the contentious jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, so the Commission — not the Court — is the operative pathway for matters concerning the United States. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) receives individual petitions against the United States under the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and has found the United States in violation of it, including in matters concerning Indigenous land rights and immigration detention. It can issue precautionary measures, request information from the U.S. government, and publish findings that carry significant international weight.

The breadth of the IAJ’s mandate matters practically in every case it investigates. A coercive parent–child separation order issued without due process engages UNCAT Articles 1 and 16, ICCPR Articles 7, 9, 14, and 17, CRC Articles 3, 8, 9, and 37, CEDAW Articles 15 and 16 where the parent is a woman, and ICESCR Articles 11 and 12 where the separation causes poverty or health deterioration. Where the family is Indigenous, ICERD, ICCPR Article 27, and CRC Article 30 are engaged as well; where the separation is effected at the border, the Refugee Protocol and ICCPR Article 13 join them. No single-treaty analysis captures the full human rights dimension of that one act. The IAJ analyses every case against every applicable framework.

The IAJ’s Legal Framework on Non-Custodial Official Harm

Much of the IAJ’s work — in immigration detention, in the conduct of law enforcement, and in historic experimentation on persons in state institutions — falls within the conventional scope of the anti-torture framework. The IAJ’s distinctive analytical contribution concerns the settings that framework has been slower to reach.

The core of that contribution is that UNCAT’s absolute prohibition on torture is not limited to custodial or interrogation settings. UNCAT Article 1 defines torture by reference to five elements: any act; intentionally inflicted; causing severe pain or suffering, physical or mental; by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official; for an enumerated purpose. The text contains no setting qualifier. This position is supported by five independent grounds:

• The treaty text. Article 1 creates no setting exclusion. The ordinary meaning of its enacted text, read under VCLT Article 31, extends to any official conduct satisfying its five elements.
• The CAT Committee. General Comment No. 2 (2008) confirms that the obligation to prevent torture extends to all branches of government, including the judiciary, and applies to all persons within state jurisdiction.
• Evolved jus cogens. The absolute prohibition on torture is a peremptory norm of general international law. Its minimum content is not limited to detention or custody. It operates above and independently of treaty architecture.
• The U.S. RUDs. The United States’ Reservations, Understandings, and Declarations carry an equivalence promise: that existing domestic law provides equivalent protection. Three European States Parties — Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden — formally objected to the U.S. UNCAT RUDs as incompatible with the Convention’s object and purpose, with Germany filing a Note 23 communication to similar effect on the same RUDs. Where domestic mechanisms demonstrably fail, the RUDs’ own logic confirms the international obligation is unfulfilled.
• Functional-custody and jurisdictional-custody analysis. Persons compelled to participate in proceedings by force of law — who cannot exit without catastrophic legal consequences, whose medical care and procedural rights are controlled by the presiding authority, and who have no effective mechanism for relief — are in a relationship of jurisdictional custody: a defined middle category between physical confinement and freedom, supported by OPCAT Article 4(2), ICCPR Article 9, CRPD Articles 14 and 17, and CRC Article 37. Within that relationship, treatment satisfying the remaining Article 1 elements is within the Convention’s scope.

The 24 Systemic Factors

Based on its intake since August 2025 — of 500 registered complainants (March 26, 2026) and 60+ third-party reports — the IAJ has so far identified 24 recurring categories of official conduct plausibly constituting torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under UNCAT Articles 1 and 16. These are policy-based institutional patterns with no effective domestic accountability mechanism. They operate at three levels:

• Level 1 — Direct harm factors: specific prohibited acts causing documented severe suffering that satisfy the Article 1 five-element test or the Article 16 CIDT threshold.
• Level 2 — Facilitation and mechanism factors: institutional mechanisms that perpetuate harm, defeat the lawful-sanctions carve-out, and make the harmful relationship inescapable.
• Level 3 — Systemic impunity factors: the absence of investigation, prosecution, training, prevention, and remedy that allows direct harm to continue indefinitely.

The 24 factors were derived from an intake concentrated in family courts and child protective services. The three-level structure is not confined to those settings: the same distinction between direct harm, facilitating mechanism, and systemic impunity organizes the IAJ’s analysis of immigration detention, of Indigenous child removal, and of the unremedied legacy of state-sponsored experimentation. In September 2025, the IAJ submitted its Preliminary Shadow Report to the Committee Against Torture’s 83rd Session (IAJ-CAT-20250919-002-PUB), identifying the 24 systemic factors and requesting initiation of an Article 20 confidential inquiry into the United States.

Contributing to the Evolution of Human Rights Understanding

The IAJ’s mandate extends beyond investigation, documentation, and reporting. In filling the gap left by the absence of a U.S. NHRI, the IAJ has found itself working on questions that existing frameworks have not yet fully addressed — questions about how international human rights law applies in institutional settings that were not the primary focus of the treaties governing them, and to violations whose acts lie in the past but whose consequences do not. The IAJ offers its analysis on these questions not as settled conclusions but as contributions to a conversation the international human rights community is still working through.

Why the U.S. Legal Setting Demands Careful Analysis

The United States operates a formally sophisticated legal system, governed by doctrines — judicial immunity, non-self-execution, the lawful sanctions framework, plenary power in immigration, the federal trust relationship with Indigenous nations, and state secrets — refined over generations. Working within this environment requires engaging seriously with those doctrines, because a human rights analysis that does not account for them will not reach the people it needs to reach. The analytical work required must meet the system on its own terms. Where the IAJ’s analysis is sound, it holds it with confidence. Where it remains contested or uncertain, it says so honestly.

The IAJ Analytical Memorandum

The IAJ Analytical Memorandum, UNCAT and jus cogens: a contemporary perspective (Version 10, March 2026, IAJ Reference PP-2026-UNCAT-01), advances original arguments for which no controlling precedent exists, engages adversarial critique systematically and transparently, and makes its reasoning available for peer scrutiny. It has been subjected to seven rounds of adversarial stress-testing. Its development benefited from consultation with practitioners in Istanbul Protocol methodology, including at the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims; those consulted have not reviewed the Memorandum, and their acknowledgment does not constitute endorsement.

Forum Nullus

One contribution is the analytical concept the IAJ terms forum nullus: the position that a proceeding which systematically deprives a litigant of the basic conditions for a fair hearing — by institutional design rather than inadvertence, for a prohibited purpose — may not be a court in the sense that law and human rights treaties require. This has implications for the finality of judgments obtained through such processes and for the jus cogens prohibition on denial of access to justice. The question is not confined to family and civil courts; it arises equally in removal proceedings conducted without meaningful access to counsel, interpretation, or the evidence on which the decision rests. The IAJ offers this as an analytical framework, not as established doctrine.

Contactless Battery: Torture Without Physical Contact

The Memorandum also develops the analysis of official conduct that causes documented physical harm — permanent neurological damage, immunocompromise, nerve death — through compelled procedural participation rather than direct physical contact. The absence of physical contact does not, on the IAJ’s analysis, change the structure of the harm where it is foreknown, documented, and deliberately continued for a prohibited purpose. UNCAT Article 1 requires no physical contact — only that a public official inflict severe suffering for a prohibited purpose. Whether this analysis is correct is for the international human rights community to assess.

Jurisdictional Custody: A New Category in International Human Rights Law

One of the IAJ’s most significant conceptual contributions — one that remains the subject of active development and that the IAJ advances as argued doctrine rather than settled law — is the concept of jurisdictional custody: a defined middle category in international human rights law that fills the gap between physical confinement (covered by conventional custody doctrine) and complete freedom (outside the anti-torture framework entirely).

Prior international human rights doctrine has proceeded almost entirely from a binary distinction: a person is either in custody, in the conventional physical sense, or free. This binary was adequate for the paradigm cases UNCAT’s drafters had in mind in 1984. It is insufficient for forms of official coercion in which courts, administrative agencies, child protective services, and immigration authorities hold persons in relationships of coercive compulsion that are neither physical custody in the traditional sense nor genuine freedom — including persons subject to electronic monitoring, reporting conditions, and supervised release pending removal.

The IAJ proposes jurisdictional custody as a defined category characterized by four elements: (a) a state authority with coercive legal power over a person; (b) a compulsory legal relationship from which the person cannot exit without catastrophic consequences — loss of all legal claims, permanent termination of parental rights, contempt of court, detention or removal, financial ruin; (c) documented foreknown severe harm from continued participation; and (d) absence of any effective domestic remedy or mechanism of exit.

This definition finds support across five treaty frameworks simultaneously:

• OPCAT Article 4(2) defines “deprivation of liberty” as “any form of detention or imprisonment or the placement of a person in a public or private custodial setting which that person is not permitted to leave at will by order of any judicial, administrative or other authority.” The definition uses “any” three times and names judicial and administrative authority as mechanisms of compulsion.
• ICCPR Article 9 guarantees that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 35 (2014), interpreted this in functional rather than architectural terms: what matters is the degree and nature of state-imposed restraint, not the physical environment.
• CRPD Article 14 prohibits the deprivation of liberty of persons with disabilities on the basis of disability and guarantees reasonable accommodation to persons with disabilities deprived of their liberty through any process.
• CRPD Article 17 protects every person with a disability’s right to physical and mental integrity, regardless of whether the mechanism of harm is physical confinement or legal compulsion.
• CRC Article 37 protects children from arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Children held in state-controlled placements by judicial or administrative authority, and their parents compelled to participate under threat of permanent termination of parental rights, are in the coercive compulsory relationship the jurisdictional-custody analysis describes.

In each setting, the four-element definition identifies whether jurisdictional custody exists; the UNCAT Article 1 five-element test then determines whether the conduct within that custody constitutes torture. This is argued doctrine, not settled law. No treaty body has expressly adopted the jurisdictional-custody category. The IAJ advances it as the most coherent synthesis of convergent treaty authority, as a framework capable of application by the CAT Committee in its Article 20 inquiry, and as a contribution to the literature the international human rights community is developing in response to forms of official conduct that the custody-or-free binary cannot adequately address.

Judicial Persecution and Torture: Clarifying the Analytical Basis

Judicial persecution — the systematic use of legal process to harm a person — is not in itself the same thing as torture as defined in international treaty law. The five Article 1 elements of UNCAT define torture with precision, and the fact that judicial or administrative conduct causes harm does not automatically satisfy them. The IAJ’s framework therefore does not treat judicial persecution as torture per se. It holds that where all five Article 1 elements are satisfied — including the severity threshold and a prohibited purpose evidenced by the official’s own documented knowledge of predicted harm — the conduct is torture regardless of the institutional setting in which it occurs. The analysis does not collapse the distinction; it applies the treaty elements to documented facts to determine which cases cross the threshold.

Continuing Obligations for Historic Violations

The IAJ’s work on MKUltra and on the federal Indian boarding school system raises a further question: what the United States owes today for violations whose operative acts occurred before it ratified the treaties now binding on it. Treaties do not ordinarily apply retroactively. But the obligations to investigate, to disclose the truth, to acknowledge victims, and to provide redress are obligations of present conduct, and international and regional human rights bodies have recognized that a state’s continuing failure to meet them, after the relevant obligation has taken effect, can itself constitute a violation. Where records were destroyed, where victims were never told what was done to them, or where the consequences of removal persist across generations, the IAJ examines whether the present failure to act is a present breach. It advances this analysis carefully, and identifies where the law remains unsettled.

Bringing Analysis to Those Whose Conduct It Addresses

The IAJ’s intention is to bring its analysis directly to the people and institutions whose conduct it addresses — judicial officers, CPS officials, immigration and border authorities, officials responsible for federal Indian policy, administrative authorities, and law enforcement personnel — not as accusation, but as education. Many of the officials whose conduct the IAJ investigates are operating within institutional cultures and doctrine-based frameworks that exclude or suppress the international human rights standards governing their conduct. Providing that framework directly — clearly, precisely, and without condemnation — is among the most direct paths to change.

The Goal: Champions, Not Defendants

The IAJ measures its deepest success not in violations documented or treaty submissions filed, but in the number of people who come to understand what they have been doing, accept that understanding with honesty, and use the authority they hold to require something closer to what human rights demands. The IAJ does not know whether it will achieve this in the United States. But it is the goal toward which all of its work is directed.

Global Relevance

The IAJ operates in the United States. But the questions it is working through — how human rights treaties apply to judicial conduct, how domestic immunity interacts with international accountability, how non-custodial official harm is documented, how states answer for the treatment of migrants and Indigenous peoples, and what remains owed for historic abuses the state concealed — arise in every legal system. The IAJ does not claim its analysis is universally applicable. But it hopes that the frameworks it develops will be useful to advocates, investigators, and officials in other countries facing analogous questions. The work is done here because this is where the IAJ operates. The ideas, if they are good ones, belong to anyone who can use them.

What the IAJ Does: The Paris Principles Functions in Practice

The IAJ performs the six core functions that a Paris Principles–compliant NHRI performs, across the full breadth of human rights obligations binding on the United States.

• Independent investigation across all human rights frameworks. The IAJ accepts complaints alleging any violation of human rights obligations by public officials, and accepts information from survivors, families, communities, and third parties. Investigation is conducted independently, without notice to accused officials. Findings are the IAJ’s own institutional conclusions, assessed against all applicable frameworks.
• Medico-legal documentation at Istanbul Protocol standard. Trauma-informed and culturally competent interviewing, credibility and arguability assessment aligned with Istanbul Protocol indicators, medical and psychological evaluation where applicable, and documentation of harm in forms meeting international standards recognized by treaty bodies. As is ordinary for bodies working to that standard, the IAJ maintains professional contact with the international community of torture documentation and rehabilitation practitioners, including the IRCT.
• Pattern identification and systemic analysis. Aggregated findings by demographic, geographic, institutional, and tactical pattern, mapped against all applicable obligations, to assess the systemic character threshold required for Article 20 and other inquiry mechanisms.
• Reporting across the full international accountability architecture. The IAJ submits documentation to the treaty bodies, Special Procedures, Universal Periodic Review, and Inter-American mechanisms described below, through the procedures available to civil society organizations.
• Legal-policy analysis and publication. Development and publication of the legal framework grounding the IAJ’s findings. The IAJ Analytical Memorandum is the first in a planned series of analytical publications covering the full treaty landscape.
• Education, standard-setting, and government engagement. Model findings, publications, and direct communications with courts, officials, and policymakers, providing independent assessment of human rights compliance and identifying the corrections international standards require.

The Full International Accountability Architecture

The IAJ engages with the complete range of international bodies to which the United States owes human rights accountability — not only the treaty bodies corresponding to ratified conventions, but the broader architecture of UN and inter-American mechanisms available to civil society organizations.

UN Treaty Bodies

• The Committee Against Torture (CAT Committee) monitors UNCAT compliance. The IAJ submitted its Preliminary Shadow Report to the Committee’s 83rd Session in September 2025 (IAJ-CAT-20250919-002-PUB) and has formally requested initiation of an Article 20 confidential inquiry into the United States.
• The Human Rights Committee monitors ICCPR compliance, including Article 7’s prohibition of nonconsensual experimentation, the detention and expulsion guarantees of Articles 9, 10, and 13, and the minority and Indigenous cultural rights of Article 27.
• The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) monitors ICERD compliance. Its early warning and urgent action procedure, which it has previously applied to the United States in respect of Indigenous land rights, is available where violations against Indigenous peoples or racial and national-origin groups require immediate attention.
• The CRPD Committee, the CEDAW Committee, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights monitor conventions the United States has signed but not ratified. Their jurisdiction over the United States is limited as a result, but they receive civil society information and address the standards at issue in their general comments and thematic work.

The UN Human Rights Council and Universal Periodic Review

The Universal Periodic Review is the broadest available international accountability mechanism, because it reviews states against all human rights obligations, not only those under ratified treaties. The United States declined to participate in its scheduled November 2025 review, the first UN member state to do so since the mechanism’s creation (Human Rights Watch). The Human Rights Council rescheduled the review to the 53rd session of the UPR Working Group, with consideration of the United States scheduled for November 10, 2026. Stakeholder submissions to the UPR are open to civil society organizations without regard to consultative status, and the IAJ regards both the review and the U.S. government’s refusal to engage with it as matters within its mandate to document and report.

UN Special Procedures and the OHCHR

UN Special Procedures are independent experts mandated by the Human Rights Council to report on specific themes or country situations. Those most directly relevant to the IAJ’s work are the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers; the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants; the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence; and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which receives individual communications concerning immigration detention. Special Procedures may conduct country visits, send communications to governments, and issue public statements — all mechanisms the IAJ’s documentation supports. The Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues provide further channels for the IAJ’s Indigenous rights work, in coordination with Indigenous nations and organizations.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) services the treaty bodies and Special Procedures, and is a primary recipient of civil society documentation and a key institutional interlocutor for the IAJ.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)

The IACHR has jurisdiction to receive individual petitions against the United States under the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. It can issue precautionary measures, request information from the U.S. government, hold thematic hearings, publish reports, and adopt country-specific resolutions. Its established record on immigration detention and on the rights of Indigenous peoples in the United States makes it a natural parallel pathway for those areas of the IAJ’s work, particularly where precautionary measures offer faster protection than the UN treaty body process.

International Cooperation and Persuading U.S. Compliance

The IAJ’s mandate includes working with other states, their NHRIs, and the international community to bring multilateral attention to bear on U.S. compliance — including through mechanisms that allow other States Parties to raise compliance concerns directly.

Inter-State Complaint Mechanisms

The United States has accepted the inter-state complaint procedure under ICCPR Article 41, which allows other States Parties to bring complaints before the Human Rights Committee where the United States has failed to fulfill its ICCPR obligations. The IAJ documents violations in a form designed to support such complaints and intends to make that documentation available to States Parties whose concerns extend to conditions within the United States — including states whose nationals are held in U.S. immigration detention or removed from U.S. territory. UNCAT and the Genocide Convention similarly contemplate state-to-state accountability.

Engaging the Six States that have Formally Contested U.S. Treaty Reservations

Three European States Parties — Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden — formally objected to the United States’ Reservations, Understandings, and Declarations to the Convention against Torture (UNCAT) as incompatible with the Convention’s object and purpose. Germany filed a Note 23 communication on the same U.S. UNCAT RUDs, reserving its legal position through the diplomatic instrument short of a formal objection. France and Spain filed formal objections to the United States’ reservations to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) — a separate treaty regime, but one that engages the same U.S. equivalence claim and the same peremptory-norm concerns the IAJ’s work addresses. All six states accordingly have a documented legal interest in U.S. treaty compliance across the two Conventions central to the Institute’s work. The IAJ’s analytical framework — demonstrating that the equivalence promise embedded in the U.S. RUDs has not been fulfilled — is directly relevant to each of those states’ legal positions. The IAJ intends to make its documentation and analysis available to those governments and their human rights ministries, and to work with civil society partners and NHRIs in those countries to ensure that U.S. compliance failures are raised in multilateral forums with the authority of those states’ formal treaty objections behind them.

Working with Accredited NHRIs

NHRIs with GANHRI A-status have procedural standing before the Human Rights Council and treaty bodies that civil society organizations do not hold. The IAJ seeks working relationships with accredited NHRIs and their regional networks so that its findings can inform independent NHRI submissions that carry formal weight in UN proceedings — particularly NHRIs in countries whose nationals are affected by U.S. immigration enforcement, and those with established practice on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

The Universal Periodic Review as a Current Priority

With the United States’ review scheduled for November 2026, the IAJ intends to ensure that the 24 systemic factors identified in its September 2025 Shadow Report, together with its documentation on immigration detention, Indigenous rights, and the unremedied legacy of state-sponsored experimentation, are placed before the UPR Working Group in a form that allows member and observer states to make informed recommendations — whether or not the United States appears.

The Long-Term Goal: A Self-Reinforcing International Accountability Architecture

The IAJ’s most ambitious international objective is a self-reinforcing accountability architecture in which the CAT Committee’s Article 20 inquiry generates findings that inform the UPR; the UPR generates recommendations that states can pursue through inter-state mechanisms and bilateral diplomacy; Special Procedures communications and country visits sustain attention between review cycles; IACHR proceedings generate precautionary measures and reports that supplement the UN record; and accredited NHRIs and civil society partners abroad carry the IAJ’s findings into the forums where their governments speak. No single mechanism is sufficient. The IAJ’s documentation and analysis are designed to feed all of them simultaneously, creating the kind of sustained, multi-channel international attention that has historically produced reform in even the most resistant state systems.

Our Core Commitments

• Breadth of mandate. The IAJ investigates all forms of human rights violation by official conduct under all frameworks applicable to the United States. No treaty is privileged over another; no category of rights, population, or period of history is excluded.
• Independence. Entirely free of government control, judicial influence, and political direction. The IAJ sets its own investigative agenda on the basis of complaints received and evidence gathered.
• Recognition of defenders. Human rights defender status is not conferred by the IAJ, by a state, or by any credentialing authority; it is recognized from a person’s words and conduct. IAJ directors, officers, investigators, members, and volunteers — together with the complainants, witnesses, and cooperating professionals who document, report, testify, or otherwise act peacefully and in good faith to promote or protect human rights — are human rights defenders within the meaning of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders (Article 1). Retaliation, intimidation, stigmatization, surveillance, obstruction, professional discipline, or punitive litigation directed at any of them because of that activity is itself a human-rights concern — whether carried out by public officials, enabled by official acquiescence, or left unprevented, uninvestigated, unpunished, or unremedied despite the state’s due-diligence obligations — and the IAJ treats such conduct as within the scope of what it documents and reports.
• Methodological rigor. Istanbul Protocol (2022) standards applied to every investigation. Findings grounded in evidence, clinical methodology, and multi-treaty legal analysis — not advocacy or assertion.
• Epistemic precision. The IAJ distinguishes preliminary findings from verified conclusions, argued legal positions from settled doctrine, and independent expert evidence from case record documentation. Where legal questions remain contested, the IAJ says so.
• Respect for survivors and communities. The IAJ works with the informed consent of the persons whose experiences it documents, and with respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous nations. It does not speak for those who have not asked it to.
• Rehabilitation as a goal. The IAJ proceeds from the conviction that persons who violate human rights can, when confronted with independent documentation and provided with education and standards, reform. Its communications with public officials are instruments of correction alongside instruments of accountability.

Disclaimer of Authority and Guarantees