Maeve O’Rourke, Human Rights and the Care of Older People: Dignity, Vulnerability, and the Anti-Torture Norm

Health, or more specifically the protection of physical and psychological integrity, sits at the core of the prohibition of torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Yet, harms as inflicted in healthcare interventions have struggled to enter the prohibition’s vision. Why have the strong protections offered by the prohibition not readily been extended to, for example, older people in institutionalized care? Responding to and grounded in the well-documented abuse of older people in care settings, Maeve O’Rourke’s book advances the case that ‘dignity violations’ of older people in care, frequently involving the denial of legal capacity, treatment without consent, physical violence, the lack of access to adequate care, be more firmly viewed as ill-treatment, specifically degradation. Connecting research, reporting, and standard setting, O’Rourke responds to the need to properly inform diplomatic negotiations afoot on an international convention on the subject in the absence of coherent jurisprudence.1 More broadly, she addresses a gap in the ‘law and torture’ scholarship, which has by and large ignored the issue.2