United Nations special rapporteurs were “bullied” into not signing a letter documenting allegations arising from the October 7 attacks, the global body’s special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment has claimed.
Dr Alice Edwards said some colleagues sought to water down a January 2024 letter detailing allegations received by her office, with a “concerted effort” to prevent aspects of the massacre being formally recorded by the UN.
In a conversation at UCL in London on Tuesday with barrister Adam Wagner KC, Edwards said only one other rapporteur ultimately signed the letter.
“That letter is a set of allegations of what happened on October 7; it was only signed by the Special Rapporteur on summary extrajudicial killings and me,” she said.
“Some other special rapporteurs and working groups had wanted to sign on, but they also had been bullied by others not to sign on, and there was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”
Edwards, whose term ends in July, said the final version was significantly weaker than her original draft.
UCL professor Dr Brad Blitz (left), Adam Wagner KC and Dr Alice Edwards[Missing Credit]
“There was a campaign to prevent that letter from going out. There were weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false,” she went on.
“All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account so the letter shrank considerably.”
The letter was eventually sent to the Permanent Mission of the State of Palestine in Geneva and "transmitted" to Hamas.
Edwards, an Australian lawyer, scholar and negotiator, was appointed to the unpaid role investigating torture allegations worldwide in 2022.
She is the seventh person in the position, the first woman to undertake the role, and one of 87 active mandate-holders supposed to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective.
As part of her work, she has one staffer and is able to undertake a single official visit to a country to investigate torture allegations a year. She supplemented this with other self-funded visits and, in December 2024, she undertook a self-funded trip to southern Israel to document October 7.
“When something of that scale occurs and it is occurring in real time... it is important to be present and to investigate,” she said.
She described October 7 as “an atrocious event” and “one of the single largest abductions of individuals in modern history in one go”.
While her decision to investigate the attacks attracted criticism from anti-Israel activists, Edwards' mandate applied to all victims, including Palestinians alleging mistreatment in Israeli detention.
“When you’re the special rapporteur on torture, every victim counts. It is not that these victims are more important than those victims.”
Edwards in southern Israel in December 2024 with hostage mothers, Mandy Damari and Simona Steinbrecher (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]
Edwards also visited the kibbutzim that had been attacked, met hostage families, including Mandy Damari, and reviewed footage filmed by the perpetrators during the massacre.
“I understand I’m the only Special Rapporteur who has ever requested to go to the Israeli mission to see the video and the documented evidence,” she revealed.
According to Wagner, who represented hostage families with British links, Edwards was “without a doubt” the UN official who engaged most seriously with their concerns.
“She was the only UN official who they feel ever reached out for them or did anything for them,” he said.
The experience informed Edwards’ landmark report, Hostage Taking as Torture, which examines hostage-taking across conflicts from Colombia and Iraq to Ukraine, Iran and Nigeria.
“What is common among these scenarios? It is the mistreatment of the individuals that is being used as leverage,” she explained.
"It is not only that they have an individual, it is the threat that they are being tortured.
“That initial fear is very grave and then of course through the torment of that, being separated from families, being held in isolation, no proof of life of the individual for months and months on end and, in the case of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, being held in Unrwa schools, in tunnels, in mosques.”
During the conversation, Edwards also said she was concerned about a growing politicisation within the UN.
“The politicisation and the attempted politicisation and instrumentalisation of the special rapporteurs... going forward there are so many of us now.
“In the past we were this agile group forty years ago or thirty years ago of people that were supposed to be able to react actively and quickly to various issues that are going on in the world. Now we are being pushed to coordinate amongst one another.”
And she is similarly troubled by the emergence of some rapporteur mandates seemingly created by “a handful of governments” as a “counter to the stronger human rights angle”.
Dr Edwards (Photo: courtesy)[Missing Credit]
“Authoritarian and totalitarian governments don’t like the special rapporteurs, so they have created their own special rapporteurs and they fund them,” she explained, citing the Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures – effectively a rapporteur against sanctions.
“Sanctions are one of the only tools we have as a human rights world to really put force on countries to do better and to stop torturing or persecuting their own populations,” she said.
She warned that chronic underfunding made the system vulnerable.
“When the system is so poorly resourced, one can be enticed to taking resources from places where one shouldn't take them,” she said. “And I think perceptions of bias are bad enough because we’re in a world where human rights are under threat,” she added.
Adam Wagner shared some of Edwards concerns.
“It appears these positions have been set up under the auspices of the Human Rights Council but they are working against some of the principles,” he said. “That is an extraordinary system to set up.”
But it is not only the rapporteur system that Edwards spoke candidly of – but the UN itself.
“The Secretary-General’s office and others are just no longer participating in peace negotiations, they are no longer front and centre,” she said.
Edwards worked under UN Secretary-General António Guterres during his time at UNHCR. Yet she believes the organisation has become increasingly sidelined as conflicts proliferate.
“At the moment of the Black Sea Grain Deal, he declared this was his greatest achievement in office. I couldn’t believe it. That is the greatest achievement in office?
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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Credit: Getty)Getty Images
“The amount of wars in the world are exponential. We have over 120 different armed conflicts going on at present and the whole raison d'être of the UN is to prevent and stop wars and they are just absent. They get invited last minute.”
“Now the UN is being organised outside the UN. We need the next UN Secretary-General to be honest about this sidelining.”
Edwards said the future of the UN is vital – but if its future cannot be guaranteed, then an alternative must be drawn up.
“We all want the UN to be a robust but also honest and objective body and if it can’t do the job, then maybe we do need to start thinking about what replaces it.
“That is a very worrying scenario,” she concluded.
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