Existing research has studied the incidence of torture using either the CIRI (Cingranelli and Richards 2004) three point ordinal scale or the Hathaway (2002) five point ordinal scale. Both scales measure the rough number of alleged or reported cases of torture in a given country in a given year. Yet scholars, activists, and policy makers are interested in more than an ordinal indicator of the number of victims. More specifically, people are interested in four questions: How many victims?; Which government agencies torture?; What types of torture are used?; and What is the state response? This project codes data on four concepts using Amnesty International (AI) documents: Incidence, Perpetrators, Motive, and Judicial Response. Unlike other data on torture and ill-treatment, which use the country-year as the unit of analysis, we use the individual allegation as our unit of observation, which greatly increases the research questions we are able to pursue.

This project has received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Grants #0921397, $173,130; #1123666, $23,685); the Department of Political Science at Florida State University; the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Merced; the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.