Torture Journal

Dr. Alice Jill Edwards (Australia) is the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment appointed by the UN Human Rights Council.  A highly skilled lawyer, scholar and negotiator, Dr. Edwards has an established record of sustained engagement on behalf of victims of human rights violations and of critical contributions to the development of standards in international law.

An advisor to governments, international and regional bodies, national institutions and civil society, Dr. Edwards understands the challenges, obstacles and opportunities for reform, and engages in respectful and courteous dialogue. Over a career spanning 25 years she has worked with a wide range of stakeholders to improve outcomes in the fields of criminal justice; police and law enforcement; military and security services; immigration, asylum, statelessness and human trafficking matters; discrimination law; and prison and correctional standards.

José Quiroga is a Chilean cardiologist and human rights advocate with decades of experience treating survivors of torture. After witnessing the 1973 coup in Chile and enduring detention and abuse, he relocated to the United States, where he dedicated his career to supporting torture victims. He co-founded the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles and has worked extensively in clinical care, advocacy, and global education. Quiroga has held leadership roles within international human rights organizations, including the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, and has been recognized with multiple awards for his contributions to socially responsible medicine and the rehabilitation of torture survivors.

Jens Modvig is a Medical Doctor and a PhD. He is a Senior Physician in DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture and Chair of the Board of the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. From 2014, he was a member, and from 2016 to 2021, the Chair, of the UN Committee against Torture.

Sara López Martín holds a PhD in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid, an LLB from the Spanish University of Distance Education, and a Master’s Degree in Access to the Legal Profession from the National University of Distance Education. She also completed an International Postgraduate Course in Psychosocial Interventions, Political Violence and Disasters, offered jointly by the Complutense University of Madrid, the School of Mental Health of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry, and the Community Action Group.

Since 2014, Sara López Martín has worked as an expert in the forensic documentation of torture and in the credibility assessment of allegations in accordance with the Istanbul Protocol. During the same period, she has coordinated the legal department at SiRa, a centre dedicated to the documentation and rehabilitation of torture survivors. She has also served as a lecturer on the postgraduate diploma course Mental Health in Situations of Political Violence and Disasters, jointly delivered by the Complutense University of Madrid and the Community Action Group, a role she has held since 2017. In addition, she has provided training on the legal aspects of the Istanbul Protocol from 2017 to the present and has worked as an expert in strategic litigation on torture and ill‑treatment cases before the European Court of Human Rights since 2014. 

Nora Sveaass is professor emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway and clinical psychologist, specialized in trauma-work with refugees. She has conducted research on family therapy with refugee families, rehabilitation of victims of torture and transitional justice. Sveaass has written numerous books and journal articles on psychology, forced migration, torture, human rights and gender-based violence in conflict. Sveaass is initiator of Mental Health and Human Rights Info (MHHRI). She has worked clinically with survivors of sexual violence in conflict and as part of the work in MHHRI, she has done a lot of training to helpers to survivors and with her team, developed manuals for those providing mental health assistance to survivors of conflict related sexual violence, against women as well as against children and men. She established and served as chair of the Human Rights Committee of the Norwegian Psychological Association (1998–2019) and was Secretary General to International Society of Health and Human Rights from 1998 – 2003. She was a member of UN Committee Against Torture (2005–2013) and of UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (2014-2022). She is also part of the Torture Journal Editorial Board.
In 2009 she was awarded the Amnesty International Prize (Norway) for her work on human rights, the University of Oslo’s Human Rights Prize and the Norwegian Academician Prize in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded The Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav and the ICP Human Rights Award in 2024.

A Mexican forensic social psychologist with over ten years of experience in preparing psychological reports using a psychosocial and gender-based approach. She specializes in documenting serious human rights violations, with a focus on cases of enforced disappearance, torture, and gender-based violence. She has a solid track record in designing psycho-legal strategies, as well as in incorporating differential approaches into expert reports, institutional training processes, and comprehensive victim care models.

Her professional work has been carried out in nongovernmental organisations, public human rights bodies, law enforcement agencies, and before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She holds a bachelor’s degree in social psychology, a master’s degree in Human Rights, and is a doctoral candidate in Psychological Research. She has also distinguished herself as the academic coordinator of graduate programs dedicated to training specialists in the preparation of medical-psychological reports, in accordance with the guidelines of the Istanbul Protocol.

Mr. Bernard Duhaime is the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, since 1 May 2024. He is Full Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM, Montreal, Canada), where he specializes in international human rights and humanitarian law. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute and a Visiting Professor at the University Paris II Panthéon Assas. Mr Duhaime has taught and published extensively and presented conferences worldwide. He is a Senior Counsel at the Québec Bar and has served as a Member of the United Nations Working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances from 2014 to 2021.

Maha Aon is an Egyptian global health practitioner and epidemiologist who has worked at the intersection of human rights and global health for 24 years. She spent close to a decade with the Danish Institute against Torture (DIGNITY) where she focused on the health consequences of torture and ill-treatment in detention settings. Maha worked with the United Nations and as an independent consultant across 20+ countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Her experience spans programme leadership, research, and capacity strengthening in complex and resource-constrained contexts. Her research focuses on self-harm, suicide, and structural determinants of health in prisons in low- and middle-income countries. She holds a PhD in epidemiology from the American University of Beirut and both master’s in health sciences and bachelor’s in public health from Johns Hopkins University. Maha is a member of the Lancet Global Health international advisory board and is a serving member of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria’s Technical Review Panel.

Christine Evans (PhD Law from LSE) is an adjunct senior lecturer at the Law Faculty of Lund University where she teaches in the LL.M on IHRL. She is also an affiliated scholar with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and conducts trainings on documentation of violations for Afghan human rights defenders.
A human rights practitioner, she previously worked twenty years with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), where she supported various human rights mechanisms, including the Committee against Torture. Christine has extensive experience of engaging with survivors of torture and SGBV in the context of human rights and IHL fact-finding missions for OHCHR field presences, Special Procedures and Commissions of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Her past assignments include the UN Sri Lanka investigation, the Syria COI, the Civil Parties Legal Representation unit at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia (ECCC) and OHCHR monitoring team in Colombia.

S. Megan Berthold, PhD., LCSW, is a Professor at University of Connecticut’s School of Social Work where she teaches clinical, research, and trauma courses from a human rights frame. She has worked with diverse refugee and asylum-seeking survivors of torture, war, human trafficking, and other traumas since the mid-1980s.
She was a clinician and educator in refugee camps in Nepal, the Philippines and on the Thai-Cambodian border. Dr. Berthold has conducted NIMH funded research examining the prevalence of torture and other traumas and the mental and physical health consequences among Cambodian refugees. She chairs the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs’ (NCTTP) Research Project with torture survivors from around the world and serves on NCTTP’s Executive Committee.
She has testified extensively as an expert witness in U.S. Immigration Court and was selected as the 2009 NASW Social Worker of the Year for her work with torture survivors. In 2024-2025 Dr. Berthold conducted research with privately sponsored refugees in Canada as a Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in Public Affairs in North America: Society, Policy, Media at Carleton University.

Sir Malcolm is Principal of Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Formerly Professor of Public International Law at the University of Bristol, he is a Titular Member of the Institute du Droit International and Honorary Senior Fellow of the British Institute or International and Comparative Law. His areas of interest include torture and torture prevention, the protection of religious liberty under international law and the international law of the sea. From 2009 – 2020 he was a member, and from 2011- 2020 Chair, of the UN Subcommittee for Prevention of Torture. He was General Editor of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly from 2013-2023 and is an editor of the journals Torture; Ocean Development and International Law; Religion and Human Rights; and the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion.

Daniel J.N. Weishut (PsyD, MBA) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, Israel. His academic and clinical work focuses on individuals and groups affected by persecution, marginalisation, and interpersonal violence, including torture.

He has extensive experience as a psychotherapist, supervisor, and forensic evaluator, and is an EU-certified trainer of trainers in the Istanbul Protocol for the documentation and assessment of torture survivors. He serves on the board of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, where he contributes to professional and advocacy efforts concerning torture and human rights.
He holds a PsyD in Clinical and Organizational Psychology and an MBA in Integrative Management from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Shannon Golden is the Evaluation and Research Lead, The Center for Victims of Torture. She is a sociologist and human rights researcher with a focus on justice and accountability after atrocities, healing and rehabilitation for survivors, and building resilient and effective civil society. She has been helping to lead program evaluation, learning, and applied research at the Center for Victims of Torture since 2015. Shannon has a PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota.

Mwangi Kevin Gitau is a human rights lawyer and strategic programme leader with over nine years of experience advancing torture prevention, documentation, redress, and accountability across national, regional, and international contexts in Africa. His work brings together legal analysis, medico-legal documentation, survivor-centred rehabilitation pathways, and evidence-based advocacy to strengthen institutional responses to torture and other serious human rights violations.
He has built a strong record of translating frontline documentation and programme evidence into policy influence, institutional reform, and higher-quality accountability frameworks. His professional experience includes leading survivor-centred work on torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances, while also supporting the development of standards, evaluations, and learning processes that improve the quality of documentation, access to justice, and redress outcomes.
At the regional level, Mwangi serves as an Expert Member of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ Technical Working Group on the Death Penalty, Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Killings and Enforced Disappearances in Africa, where he contributes to continental norm-setting, policy guidance, and strategic engagement with states and regional institutions. He is also a member of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) Technical Working Group on Migration and Torture in Africa, through which he has contributed to comparative research and advocacy on patterns of torture and ill-treatment affecting people on the move.
His contributions to knowledge production include co-authoring The Torture Roads – The Cycle of Abuse Against People on the Move in Africa and contributing to analytical and policy work on torture documentation, enforced disappearances, rehabilitation, and access to justice. In his current work, Mwangi leads and supports multi-country programmes focused on implementation of human rights recommendations, programme quality, and accountability systems, while engaging governments, civil society, and international mechanisms to advance rights-based reform. He brings to the Editorial Advisory Board a practitioner-informed and policy-literate perspective, grounded in field experience, regional engagement, and a sustained commitment to ensuring that knowledge serves both prevention and redress.
He holds a Master of Arts in Human Rights, a Postgraduate Diploma in Law, and a Bachelor of Laws.

Humanitarian forensic doctor with over 10 years of experience in conflict and migration settings, with a specific focus on missing persons, mass-fatality management, and the medico-legal documentation of torture and ill-treatment.
She has held leadership and advisory roles within the International Committee of the Red Cross, combining operational coordination with strategic planning, policy development, and institutional engagement.
Her work focuses on strengthening forensic and medico-legal systems, supporting evidence-based humanitarian responses. She has extensive experience applying the Istanbul Protocol and working within multidisciplinary rehabilitation frameworks for victims of torture. She currently serves as Medical Director in forensic medicine within the Italian National Health Service, providing expert medico-legal advice in criminal and civil proceedings, including cases related to torture and violence.