‘The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world’, George Orwell wrote in 1984. It ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’ Room 101 represented, in Orwell’s dystopia, torture’s destruction of the human body and soul. And to the extent that we think about torture today, we think of any form of deliberate ‘coercion or violence, mental or physical, to extort information or to humiliate, punish or intimidate’, in such a way as ‘to offend the person’s sense of dignity’:1¹ physical pain and psychological anguish, and an assault on dignity, as quite precisely narrated in 1984.

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前言

“101 房间里的东西是世界上最糟糕的东西”，乔治奥威尔在 1984 年写道。它“因人而异。” 可能是活埋，也可能是火死，或淹死，或被刺穿，或其他五十人死亡。在某些情况下，这是一些非常微不足道的事情，甚至不是致命的。101号房间在奥威尔的反乌托邦中代表了对人体和灵魂的折磨。就我们今天想到的酷刑而言，我们想到的是任何形式的蓄意“胁迫或暴力，无论是精神上的还是身体上的，以勒索信息或羞辱、惩罚或恐吓”，以“冒犯人的意识”尊严”：1 ¹身体上的痛苦和心理上的痛苦，以及对尊严的侵犯，正如 1984 年所准确描述的那样。