Transcript

Ivar Fahsing  

Welcome to the podcast, Fanny Aboagye. You are currently the Assistant Commissioner of the Ghana Police Force. But this week we are together here in New York on the UN COPS High-Level Meeting for the event of launching the UN manual on investigative interviewing. And from your perspective, from your background, position and experience, what would you say are the reasons why such a manual is needed? 

Fanny Aboagye 

Thank you very much, Ivar. We are here in New York to launch the UN Manual on Investigative Interviewing. I think this manual is very necessary at this time because for several years, I believe, investigators, their experiences, have taken a lot of things for granted. And so, most of our investigations, all our interviews are done to obtain confessions from our interviewees. 

The manual brings out the human rights aspects of investigative interviewing, which means accurate information, not to use any coercive method to obtain this information. 

My first entry into the police, the question that was posed by our first lecturer: how do you obtain accurate information? And the answers that came out were as good as you can imagine. I mean, from coercive methods, unethical methods. That was the first time that I was actually introduced to ethical interviewing. And so when I had the opportunity working in New York to be part of this group of people to develop this manual, I thought the manual has come at the right time. 

There’s nothing like too late. It has actually come to smoothing the way investigators do interviews. In saying that, what I mean is sometimes you think you are doing the right thing, you know, until you are introduced to something else. Then you know that you can modify your way of working to be able to, you know, give proper justice to every investigation that you are doing. So I think this manual actually fills that gap. 

When you read it looks quite familiar. The methods in it looks quite familiar, but when you read it again and again and again, you realise that it provides some additional areas of interviewing that you might not have thought about. So the manual actually is a good one. 

It came the right time of our career as police officers. The new officers coming in as investigators will have to do the right thing from now. And so I think that’s what this manual helps us to achieve.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Absolutely. In many ways, what I think at least is that we are, as police officers, not really taught from the beginning how different an interview is from a normal conversation. So it’s kind of, you think you intuitively can interview because you’re able to speak or talk and as I think the manual shows that no, the purpose of a normal conversation is not to gather accurate and reliable information is mainly to be part of a social play. You don’t really want the whole story, you don’t want all the details, that’s breaching social codes. You just want the headlines and then move on. Exactly the opposite of what you really want in an interview. If you came back from vacation or a weekend, if someone asks you to start from the time you left home and include all details until you return, you know, it will be a tremendous breach of social codes and anything. So this is, I think, also so important to remind ourselves as professionals that it’s actually a very different purpose and that requires for different methods as well. 

Although what you are saying, Fanny, is that this is a much needed instrument now for building that awareness and skill base early on, as far as I understand, this is still quite far from reality in most of the countries, not only in Africa, but also in Europe, of countries that actually have been going through a process of change. And when I say change, I mean that you deliberately have to leave behind what you used to do and you have to know why. And then deliberately take in something different because you think that brings you closer to where you should be. So that deliberate shift also recognized on the top level in your organization because it has to be facilitated by resources, by training and by mindset cultures, I guess. So could you say something about what that looks like in Ghana or in Western Africa as far as you know when it comes to that process of change? 

Fanny Aboagye 

Definitely change is always a very difficult thing, especially when people are very used to their organizational culture. Yeah, but change can happen when you know where you want to be. Talking about Ghana and about the police, our vision is to become a world-class policing, with respect to human rights So this becomes where we want to be. Where we are now is very difficult to determine. 

So some are a little ahead of others. And so we need to kind of reach those who are a little behind, closer to those who have actually advanced in investigative interviewing. I think basically this has to be part of our training curriculum, right from the basic training in our academies, because in all of this, the academy is where we do training for our very senior officers, yeah? But in all of this, because of oversights, responsibilities. Even the senior officers need to understand the process so that they can have good oversight over our younger officers. So I think to get to be a world-class policing as our vision says, it is important that some of this change is embraced and is promoted, you know, because if we don’t, if we don’t even accept that we have to change, then we will not get anywhere. So we have to embrace this in totality. I will say that coming a good step in the right direction. Because from here, I’m going to introduce the manual to Director General CID so that because investigators mostly do the interviewing right so that they can also incorporate it into their detective training school. So in all the different levels the basic training school, the detective training school, the police academy, the command and staff college, all of these different levels have different impacts when it comes to interviewing. So I believe Ghana is doing what we are doing because that’s the knowledge that we have now. That is what we know. I mean, that is the experience that has been gotten over the years. But I know that if we want to really reach our objective of being a world-class policing, then we have to be fine police officers, you know, excelling in every area of our work and making sure that when you present a case to court, you have done the right thing, you know, and that will actually give us, you know, the convictions that we want from the courts. Maybe not that much, but then you know that you have gone through the right steps and this is what the manual provides for us. So I think Ghana is on course and we are still committed to you know gradually shaping our officers and our thinking you know and not relaxing into the Ghana culture. This is how we do it you know and not wanting to change. This manual is a good manual and it will go a long way to help the service. 

Ivar Fahsing 

This is the first documentation of a true global standard. This is what we should aim for. And it’s sometimes much easier to find that outside because then you probably have less discussion in the inside, well, what is really the standard. Sometimes that’s really hard to carry that message inside any organization, no matter your position. Because, as you said, people basically don’t want to change. We are just built that way, that why can’t I just go on? Do you mean I’m not good enough for these kind of typical human things. That change is not that easy. So I think it’s really interesting to hear what you say about the importance of management, oversight, and also to communicate expectations and future directions. So that’s, I think it shows deep insight, I think, in what is necessary to foster these changes. There are early research from the early 90s in England where they actually started to see what creates a positive change in the rescue Investigative interviewing and they early on found that the police districts that didn’t involve the top level management in this change process didn’t prosper. 

You know, speaking from a Ghana perspective, but I guess also as having spent a lifetime in policing in Western Africa, what would you say is the situation around you? You see a similar development in other African countries, or is this something that mainly is going on in your own country? 

Fanny Aboagye 

Policing is almost the same when two police officers from different countries meet. You see, they are very like-minded when it comes to how we work. I will be more than certain to say that it’s almost the same for people in my sub-regions. Of course, I have the honor to also facilitate some of the courses at Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training, where officers are drawn from across the West Africa region and we like collaborative policing where we have all these officers to share their experiences from across their countries. And in all honesty, it comes almost to the same way of doing things. With respect to the manual, I believe that there should be like an implementation phase of this manual to reach as many countries and continents as possible. I’m saying this because when you have something that’s so beneficial to you, it shouldn’t happen that other countries around you do not have same methodology. And so I’m thinking, like, if there would be a way to have maybe trainings. And I mean, we have a lot of Peacekeeping centers around West Africa and these institutions can be used, they can facilitate the sharing of this knowledge to a much wider countries in the region. So I think if the organizers or those who started to do this can think about that. Because I think at the end of the day, what we want to really achieve is to have a non-coercive process when it comes to interviewing. 

When you go to peacekeeping missions, we have people from all over the world coming into these missions and to perform their police roles in these missions. If we are not like -minded, we ourselves will be a problem even in the mission. But if we are like-minded and we come there, then we complement each other. You know, there may be people who will be very good at training, there may be people who will be very good at interviewing, but then we can complement each other. They will not be leaving anybody behind. Then the country that we are serving can benefit from these experiences. So I think when I have to think about the sub-region, I believe we are all on the page where we need to kind of correct a lot of things around interviewing. And so a follow-up phase to reach as many as we can will be helpful for even my region, West Africa. 

Ivar Fahsing 

I really agree with your reflections that police officers and maybe even detectives around the world are quite similar. I definitely share that reflection. I’ve also been fortunate enough to do investigations almost everywhere in the world during my time as a detective. You meet people that have had the same position as yourself over time and you feel… It’s so interesting that you have exactly the same focus. 

What is your background and how did you end up in this position? 

Fanny Aboagye  

I’m an assistant commissioner of police now. Currently, I’m the divisional commander for Western North region. When it says that you are a divisional commander, it means that you have a lot of districts and stations under you and you are responsible for the operation, administrative and everything, you know, for that division. 

My story in police is quite interesting because I came into the police as a professional. My university education was in estate management. So we were recruited as estate officers from the university into the police. And then I learned about peacekeeping, and so my then supervisor and boss, agreed and and so we did the UN exam and went to East Timur in 2002. And that changed my perspective on policing, especially because it was a conflict zone and it was an executive mandate, which means that we need to be police officers in that mission. It trained me to use the weapon, to do investigations, and to do everything about policing in that mission. 

So I have had the opportunity of learning so much about peacekeeping. Peacekeeping, security, safety, and all these different complex contests. That has actually equipped me in many, many diverse, you know, contests because like in mission, you know, you can start from something small and then generate into, much more complex situation. And when you are working in such fields, you are able to adjust to the different contests that you come into. 

My current post was in January this year. That’s when I was transferred to my current division. And I mean, so far, I would say that it’s working well there. Because I have accumulated all these experiences before, it’s quite easy to manage the division. 

We’re actually doing our best to bring policing to the doorsteps of people and not to abuse the privileges that comes with the work because sometimes when you are in uniform, you seem to be like a different person. So we are trying to get more contacts with our clients and educating them as to what they have to do when they have all these conflicts. We are also trying to do proper investigations. 

I’m still, I mean, forging forward in what I do and making sure that everywhere that I am, I bring impact to both the officers and even the clients that we meet, you know, and ensure that policing is not… so to say, the way people look at them, like very afraid of them, but to bring them so close to the people that they know that police are the friends of the people. 

Ivar Fahsing 

That’s so fascinating. What strikes me, Fanny, that I never thought about this in this way before until I hear your story, is that what we also in Norway call peacekeeping policing is actually very transformational work. 

You are coming into areas that are sometimes scattered of any structure and governance and security and you have to start to build something and transform. So I think your background there is so important and the skills you have and the things you’ve seen not only in your own region but around the world. It must be a tremendous strength in your position it also gives you a lens where you can analyze where are we actually, what should be expected, what is policing actually all about. 

Really inspirational to hear that, yourself as a female officer, what is the gender rate at the time?  

Fanny Aboagye 

I think we are now about 27 % of our male counterparts. So, I mean, in Ghana we have quite a high number of female offices. The majority of course are junior officers, but even the senior core, we should probably be like 15-17 percent of the senior core. So that’s quite encouraging and junior offices look up to us so much. 

It’s quite encouraging and I mean I also like the fact that our current administration is sending us out onto the field. I mean it shows that the operational thing of policing is not only for the men and they are introducing a lot of senior officers in the regions which is quite… It’s quite good and quite interesting because like… Maybe previously, years, years ago, the very senior officer, because there were so few, we’re all concentrated at the headquarters, you know, and really not that out. So this has actually given us an opportunity to prove ourselves as females and to do the work. Let also the people see us as equal. 

Like we talked about change before, there’s always… that difficulty changing but once you have your authorities or the senior officers going that direction they are able to move everybody into that direction and so I think females are doing quite well in Ghana now. We have a lot of senior female senior police officers very intelligent, hard-working offices and we are all doing our bit to help the service and to contribute our quota to the service.  

Ivar Fahsing 

I’m sure you’re a fantastic role model and I want to share with you, because I think also there is a gender issue in the transformation towards investigative interviewing, as you said yourself, we are trying to move away from accusatory, confession-oriented styles that very often is linked to kind of a macho way of policing, that way you’re being intimidating, it comes less natural to women. 

And I think the non-confrontational, communicative, active listening way is at least something that we saw in Norway 20-25 years ago, came much more natural.  

Fanny Aboagye 

For women.  

Ivar Fahsing 

For women. So I have to say that probably in Norway now you see that the top level, the gold level of interviewers in our most profiled cases are a majority of women. Not only on the leadership positions, but also in the operational interview detectives. And it’s a very challenging job to go into that room and see what information you can bring out with relevance in a professional way. It’s a core task in any high-level investigation, and it’s all resting on the shoulders of professional women. 

I think also just the dynamics, because after all, at least in many of the most serious crimes, there’s no secret that most of the perpetrators are men. So the risk of getting a cockfight inside that interview room is actually much less if you have a female interviewer. 

That’s at least our experience. And I think it’s under-communicated, this gender issue in the transformation towards investigative interviewing. I think it’s very important, not only for the production of good interviews, but for the transformation of the culture around it.  

Fanny Aboagye 

Yeah, absolutely. I agree. 

 Ivar Fahsing 

Well, before we round off, there is one more question I would like to ask you. If you look around the world now, it’s not everything that we’re seeing is going the right way. We have conflicts, we also have political developments that are not very optimistic. 

Nevertheless, we are promoting a more human rights-based way of interviewing in this hostile world. And I guess some people would call our efforts a bit naive and over optimistic. But still, you seem to believe in it and fight for. What do you think about your future?  

Fanny Aboagye 

I know what you’re saying and it’s a very difficult situation that we have now because there’s not too much transparency in the world now makes it… It’s very difficult to operate the context that you have because your bosses are receiving instructions in a direction that probably favors the government or the political space and that information is not a must-know. 

So sometimes you wonder why you are pushing a good agenda that is not being embraced at the top. Because the top itself is also struggling to find their ground. We are not naive. I think that what this manual provides is knowledge, awareness and great skill. Maybe it doesn’t move as fast as we wanted for obvious reasons, you know, for the political space, for… Some people are even adamant to change. Some of our authorities, they just don’t like it. This is what is giving us a good face, getting more convictions, and you know, ticking the box. You know how many people were you able to prosecute last, you know, so all of these things are going to hinder the first progress or the first implementation of the tenets of this manual. 

That’s not naive. And so like I said before, our task is to make sure that at least the middle management, the supervisors, grab this, embrace this. And then how that will move up the ladder, but we are also not naive about some of it almost looks like an impossibility, but I believe that investigative interviewing is not done at that top hierarchy. It’s done mostly in the middle you know. And so that’s our space. 

And we have to make sure that our space is good, our space is intact, our space is not coercive. Eventually, this space is going to give a good light to the political space, right? I know it’s going to be difficult to just permeate the political space. But so far, if we are able to make sure that the policing space is good and intact, the government and all of those things will begin to appreciate, you know, what we do as police officers. But that’s really a very difficult context and scenario. 

Ivar Fahsing 

I completely agree and it’s so fundamental what you’re saying that policing space is about creating trust and which is absolutely the fundamental of our legitimacy as law enforcement officers if you don’t have that fundamental trust in your own population. 

How can you even do the job? That trust is created in those daily meetings. Every single day our officers meet some of their citizens. And how do you actually develop that meeting? How do you show that dignity? No matter how difficult this situation is, you stay professional and follow your methods and your ethical codes and it will take you a very long way. I think we’re talking about, like you say, the absolute core values of what policing is all about. So I obviously share your optimism, even in a bit dark period of the world, I think that makes it probably even more important that we fight for these fundamental principles of not only of policing but of human dignity.  

Fanny Aboagye 

Absolutely. 

Ivar Fahsing 

Well, but that, Fanny, I will not steal more of your precious time and I say thanks a lot for a really interesting conversation. I’ve learned a lot of you.  

Fanny Aboagye 

Same here.  

Ivar Fahsing 

And I wish you the best in your future mission. Thank you. And I hope we can cooperate.  

Fanny Aboagye 

Yes, most definitely. In the future.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Thank you so much.  

Fanny Aboagye 

Thanks a lot. 

Transcript

0:06 

Børge Hansen: Hello, and welcome to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with me, Børge Hansen, your host and CEO of Davidhorn. 

0:14 

Today’s episode takes it into the world of human rights, justice and the powerful practise of investigative interviewing. 

0:22 

We’re thrilled to have Gisle Kvanvig from the Norwegian Centre of Human Rights with us today. 

0:27 

Together, we’ll talk about the release of the Manual on Investigative Interviewing for Criminal Investigations. How this works supports a very important goal, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #16. 

0:42 

This goal is all about making societies and institutions peaceful, just and strong. 

0:49 

So join us as we learn more about the global work for human rights, the importance of Fair, efficient and transparent policing, and the new standard for investigative interviewing created by the United Nation. 

1:02 

We’re here to connect the dots between research and real-world action, aiming for a future where everyone gets to be heard. So let’s get started 

1:09 

Børge Hansen:  I’m here today with Gisle Kvanvig from the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights. Welcome to our podcast.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you for having me.  

Børge Hansen: So tell me, Geisle, Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, you’re role there. And how did you land in in in that organisation? 

1:32 

Gisle Kvanvig: Well, first of all, it’s a multidisciplinary centre at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. I have been there for almost 14 years now 

Børge Hansen: Quite a while.  

Gisle Kvanvig: It is quite a while. It is. It’s the longest job I’ve ever had. So it must say something about how much I enjoy. I landed there after having worked both for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and also having worked for an NGO. 

1:59 

And then there was an opening and I applied and in the beginning I was the director of Vietnam programme there.  

Børge Hansen: OK, So you started out with the Vietnam programme.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. And that’s also where we gradually developed sort of police portfolio, which is the one that I’m working on now and where my role and responsibility mainly pertains to our multilateral work. So working with organisations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, we’ve had a little bit of contact with the EU, but also regional for us like the Association for Southeast Asian Nations and and others.  

2:36 

Børge Hansen: So why does the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights exist?  

Gisle Kvanvig: It was established a long time ago, I think almost 30 years now. I think we were 30 last year. And it was established as a branch of the Faculty of Law to study human rights, in particular and to establish human rights in Norway as an academic discipline or field in itself and not simply as part of of law studies. 

3:13 

Børge Hansen: Because it’s part of the university in Oslo. And so you say it started out as studying human rights and then working on them in Norway.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. But also internationally. So I mean it was both the study of the international conventions and then you would have some people looking at how it applies to Norwegian law and the Norwegian context and also taking part in developing that law and these policies in Norway. But human rights of course, have that international dimension anyways. 

3:49 

You also had people advising processes on the UN resolutions and also the development and follow up of the different conventions within the UN. So it’s both sort of domestic and international.  

Børge Hansen: And then now I think, we’re in in early April right now, and yesterday you guys were part of releasing the UN manual for investigative interview.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes.  

Børge Hansen: Congratulations.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you very much. Thank you. It was a long process but eventually, we succeeded in having the very first manual on investigative interviewing for criminal investigations at the UN level. 

4:26 

And it’s also a manual that is system-wide meaning that it applies to all the UN organisations because it’s been through all the relevant internal proceedings and fulfils all the requirements of that kind of document.  

Børge Hansen: Tell me why is this manual important and I know you guys spend some time on this. It’s taking many years.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. It took, I think from the very sort of first instance, the first time we heard about the idea or that we were approached by the UN Police Department, which is part of the Department of Peace operations, at the UN in New York that that was in 2017. 

5:10 

I think they approached us and asked if we would be interested in taking part in developing such a manual. And we were interested in that because it emerged as a sort of ambition or idea on our part back in 2015. 

5:32 

There, we had a discussion basically about what if we, rather than travelling around with lots of British and Norwegian sort of standards and teaching documents and courses and lessons and theory, academic books and so forth, we would have something more like a common global standard that we could all measure ourselves up against. So very much like the thinking behind the Sustainable Development Goals as well. And this emerged after we had the first conversation after training that we conducted together with Norwegian police in Vietnam. 

6:08 

We thought that you know that it would be really interesting and I think also constructive if we had something that we would share and have in common. And then the United Nations is a sort of natural repository for those kinds of documents. 

6:25 

It has that legitimacy. It has that authority. It has that recognition despite you know all the debates and whatever strengths and flaws the United Nations system has. It’s the only organisation that sort of has that recognised mandate… 

Børge Hansen: It’s the best we have right now at least.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, it’s the best we have right now. And if it didn’t exist, someone would invent it.  

Børge Hansen: But tell me, so you mentioned the sustainable development goals.  

7:06 

And then one of these is #16, which is, if I paraphrase it, it’s called something like peace, justice and strong institutions. So peace, justice and strong institutions is a part of a sustainable development of societies.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. Yeah.  

Børge Hansen: And then you briefly mention it when you’re talking about the manual. Well, why? So why is this relevant and why interviewing and criminal investigations.  

7:31 

Gisle Kvanvig: First and foremost, the sort of spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals is very much that we all have work to do, and that also refers back to investigative interviewing. Whether you’re looking at interviewing or investigation practises, all countries around the world have a lot of work to do. 

7:53 

And then there’s that sort of principle element to it which fits nicely with the kind of work we do that, you know, you talk about the errors of justice in your own country and then you can discuss the errors of justice in another country and you’re on a more sort of equal footing. And then, you can discuss practice, theory, and how to improve upon practice. And it means that there’s a commonality in this. So there’s a balance in that relationship. On the interviewing side and the investigation side, I mean we’re looking at SDG 16 and particularly Target 3, which is about promoting the rule of law domestically and internationally. 

8:33 

And the rule of law has of course many components. It’s a fairly large and somewhat elusive concept I find. But if you look at principles of equality before the law, for instance, it’s not only about the fact that we are all to be treated equally before the law, that we have the same rights and that we are no longer just the subject of a king. But it’s also a way of thinking where you can adjust the level-playing field, so to speak, because there is a disproportionate out of power on behalf of the state against the individual inside of the criminal justice system. 

9:10 

And this is where human rights sort of link into the rule of law through, for instance, the fair trial principles. Because they are there to ensure that we as individuals have a better chance when we are faced with the full power and authority of the state. Because when you’re only one individual and you’re facing the police and the prosecution and you know the sort of monopoly and violence that the state rightfully owns, it means that we, we need a little bit of backing. We need someone in our corner to help us have all that playing field. And when you look at the fair trial principles, for instance, you will have the presumption of innocence, which is a somewhat difficult concept. 

10:00 

Because if you think about if you’re a police and you arrest someone and then you’re about to interview that person, it means that you have to presume that your suspect is innocent. That is a very difficult thing to do. That’s where investigative interviewing comes into play because it is a very practical way of upholding the presumption of innocence. 

Børge Hansen: Because that’s just human practice, right? We all have biases, and then, you know, on the face of it, we make conclusions, or we can jump to conclusions. We’ve seen that in Norway quite a few times the last 20-30 years.  

10:44 

For quite a while we had the notion that you’re innocent until proven guilty but still police officers and investigators make up their own minds and might you know jump to conclusions, and that’s what you’re talking about how to to instil as a profession to don’t have that bias but rather have actual facts perhaps. 

11:09 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. I mean, it’s basically what I mean, which is what the recently departed Daniel Kahneman was writing about and researching for decades. 

11:22 

It’s this tendency that we all have to seek information that confirms our first perception of the truth. So, he says quite eloquently that if we are to avoid that bias, we need a method because, without a method, we’re incapable of doing it. We’re mainly emotional decision-makers. If we are to be rational, we really need methods.  

Børge Hansen: So Daniel Kahneman wrote a book, “Thinking Fast and Slow”. 

11:51 

If I remember correctly, you have system one and system two. You’re either instinctively reacting to things or making decisions in a more planned or conscious manner.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s the system one is basically emotional. So we act according to our emotions, our beliefs, our persuasions, and prejudices as well. And if we’re to avoid that, and again, if you’re a detective, if you are to avoid your prejudices and biases, you need a systematic method to sort of keep those in check. Otherwise, you will develop tunnel vision, and you will make many wrong decisions.  

12:42 

Børge Hansen: Why the interviewer? In the movies and other places, you can hear it being called interrogation. It’s associated with coercion. And now you describe it as interviews not interrogations. 

 13:00 

Why did you guys in Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, and we’ll come back to the work you do here, but you kind of centre around interviews as a mechanism for supporting the SDG16 and human rights.  

Gisle Kvanvig: It basically goes back to how our prior experiences, both at the centre and in other jobs that I’ve done. When you try to sort of teach human rights to police or the military or intelligence, it has rarely been particularly effective. There’s rarely much engagement. And I think that goes back to how when you start just talking about the conventions and all the rules, mainly what you’re telling them is everything they can’t do. And I think, you know, in pedagogics, you, in general, would tell us that you really have to focus on what to do and not only on what not to do. 

14:05 

But unfortunately, you know, human rights are about many rules. So it’s easy to mainly focus on everything that you can’t do. You cannot sort of get rid of the defence lawyer. You cannot be persuasive. You cannot be manipulative. You cannot lie. I mean there are many of these different standards, but it’s all just don’t do this and don’t do that. And that is just not very constructive for learning. So when we came across these Norwegian police officers who were experts in investigative interviewing and they started explaining that to us, we saw that this was a way of doing fair trial. 

14:43 

Because again, it’s always the question when you’re talking about the rule of law or democracy or human rights, fair trial in this case, how do you do it? How do you do the presumption of innocence? How do you uphold equality before the law principle? How do you secure independence and objectivity? These things are difficult to do unless you have proper guidance. And that requires a method that is also consistent across the system. 

15:19 

They would have a situation where some officers or lawyers would think in this way and pursue evidence in their own way, and others would do it differently. That makes it very difficult to evaluate, which again means that it’s also almost impossible to assess its effectiveness, and then that undermines progress.  

Børge Hansen: So what you’re saying is instead of putting rules, say not to do this, not to do that, you say here’s a practice supporting fair trials. Is that way of putting it?  

16:02 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, yeah, yes it is. Because it’s also the conversation that we had with police officers that again, when you’re talking about human rights, you could compare it to other professions. So if you think about teachers who teach our children to read and write, we cannot have teachers that mainly focus on human rights. 

16:12 

They have to focus on pedagogics. They have to focus on teaching and be really good teachers. But they are fulfilling the right of the child to an education and in a similar respect. You know, the police also need methods that they can trust and that are compliant with human rights so that they can pursue their job professionally without sort of single-mindedly thinking about human rights. Because I think that it’s almost too much of an ask in many ways because once you enter a crime scene with all the violence that may have taken place at this crime scene and you’re about to start an investigation. 

16:48 

It’s very difficult to look up the entire conventional civil and political rights and all the fair trial principles and act accordingly because it doesn’t tell you how to conduct your investigation. You need separate methods for that, and that’s where investigative interviewing comes in, both in terms of the interviewing practice itself and also the thinking that actually governs the interviewing process.  

17:19 

So the investigative side of investigative ensuing where you have the development of hypotheses, what may have happened because that’s the starting question for any investigation is not to jump to conclusions, not even if someone is dead, it’s easy to just jump to the conclusion that this person has been murdered. And that’s called a crime bias. And it’s very well known within the police. 

17:43 

And to avoid that, you know, you have to think as an investigator that my job is to figure out what happened here. And then there are, you know, multiple possible explanations for this death, and you have to eliminate them and then focus on the ones that you can find evidence or backing for.  

Børge Hansen: But you know when you see the movies you see people say it’s obvious what happened here. 

18:07 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the conclusion-jumping machine that’s the brain as we’ve been taught by a Kahneman and others that it’s what we are made to do and that’s why we need systems to keep that in check.  

Børge Hansen: So you’re basically working with a methodology that counters human nature, basically. 

18:29 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, much like in any other discipline, as I mentioned, when you’re a teacher, you will have your pedagogics. If you’re a surgeon, you will have your tools and procedures, and you know, if you read the Checklist Manifesto, I forget the name of the author. But it’s the same point about airline pilots. You cannot just do this naturally and on the whim because that means that it’s less secure and you can’t trust it to the same extent. 

18:59 

We passengers need to know that there is a system and routines in place to ensure the safety of this plane.  

Børge Hansen: So this is fundamentally based on our values. So you work for the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, and you talk about contributing to the release of the UN manual on the investigations. So, it’s clearly a value-driven project. 

19:26 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think it’s important particularly, at this point in time as well, we see that rights, democracy, rule of law are under pressure. I would say that it’s much more severe than that because we see threats to them also within our own society. I mean there are things that we have forgotten to think about properly. If you think about the post-war generation and when the whole UN system came into being and then all these different conventions you had. First, of course, you had the Universal Declaration, and then you had subsequent conventions and covenants on the right side. 

20:11 

And all of these were, of course, developed on the basis of a very troubling time, two world wars. So they were there as a testament to an agreement on common issues, problems, and challenges facing mankind. And I think that we’ve somehow left a lot of that behind, that we’ve forgotten the circumstances that these different treaties were developed within and why they were important to begin with. 

20:41 

I think we’re starting to maybe remember some of it now because things are… 

Børge Hansen: There are a few reminders out in the world right now.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think that in our work, I mean, where I see that it fits in is that whether you’re talking about democracy, the rule of law, or human rights, it requires maintenance. And that means that you have to keep developing it so that it matches the standards, values, and requirements of the public and society. 

21:12 

Børge Hansen: So yeah being value driven. Your organisation stems out of university in Norway. Universities have it based on core beliefs and philosophies, and then when you take these values and I know it’s also supported by UN, but still it’s a good question to ask. So when you’re exporting let’s say Nordic values or Western European values at least out into the world how is that perceived. Because it’s easy to come from a country in the Nordics where it’s fairly peaceful. 

21:52 

We have safety, we’re fairly well off, median income and people are in a happy place compared to many places in the world, and then we go on a crusade and say hey here are our values and do like us. But we’re not perfect either, so how do you see that being perceived around the world? 

22:12 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think it’s a very good point and I think it’s one of the major pitfalls of particularly the sector that I work in. It’s very easy to just walk into that trap of preaching basically. And this is also a major, major change that’s been happening gradually, but it has become very present today is that there is no longer any patience on behalf of any so-called developing country for that at all. So it’s very much about how you do it. The reason why we could start working with investigative interviewing was because it’s research-based and that permits us to, when we meet police services from other countries or intelligence services, share the research and then we can share our reflections on that research. 

23:11 

And I think that one of the things that we discovered very early on and where the Norwegian police were brilliant was that they always started with explaining or basically presenting cases of errors of justice in Norway and said, so we can start the conversation saying that here’s the research, this is what it tells us and here are the mistakes that we made and we made them for these different reasons. Does that sound familiar? 

23:41 

Børge Hansen: And these mistakes are not way, way in the past. It’s just fairly recent. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. And they will, you know, in many ways they will continue to make them probably not in the same way as in the past. But we’re talking about cases from the 90s, probably up to the early 2000s and even more recently we see examples of sort of traditional practises and mistakes being made not, you know, intentionally but it happens because of human nature. 

24:12 

And I think if you want to start that conversation about changing practises and values it will change through change practises, it’s sort of the opposite way of like when I said that we were used to going around the world and presenting human rights here. The conventions, these are the rules apply them and comply with them and and that’s it. 

24:38 

You know, that’s the same sort of thinking that used to govern a lot of our work as well. And you know, this made it possible to start that conversation quite differently. So these were our mistakes. This is how we dealt with them. Does any of this sound familiar? Are you interested in pursuing some sort of cooperation on this? And in the very beginning, that was our big question. We didn’t know if anybody would be interested. We started out working in Vietnam and Indonesia first. 

25:10 

Børge Hansen: Why did you go there first? 

Gisle Kvanvig: Because we had in our centre the Vietnam programme that I was a head of and then a colleague who ran a similar programme in Indonesia. So, the first country we started was Vietnam. And then quite quickly Indonesia followed, and our research question, to begin with, was, really this method was developed in the UK, it was imported to Norway, adapted to our circumstances, and now we’re trying to export them to Southeast Asia, a completely different language, culture, political context and so on. And we didn’t know if they would at all be interested in this. 

Børge Hansen: Were they?  

25:56 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes, very much. And I think we didn’t really know what to expect. I mean normally what happens is that they will say this is interesting, you know, tell us more maybe later. But here the reaction was very different and I think that’s because it is so practical. 

26:12 

And when you talk to detectives and investigators, they recognise the thinking. It’s not rocket science in the sense that on a good day, they will not have mistreated whoever they’re interviewing. And they will have at least a minimum level of respect for their rights. They will probably ask them open questions, and they will have some experience that if you do that, you will gain more and better information. 

26:44 

Because what happens very quickly in the training when we run them, is that there’s a lot of scepticism to begin with. But then probably somewhere in the middle of day 2, it starts dawning on parts of the audience at least usually the most experienced detectives.  

Børge Hansen: Ok, so that’s interesting. Why do you think the experienced detectives, gain an understanding? And what you’re describing is both an understanding and also an acceptance of perhaps what you said the research behind this. 

27:20 

What’s happening in a detective’s mind during these days? 

Gisle Kvanvig: They typically start thinking about cases where they suspect they may have been wrong as wrongful conviction cases. So they’ve recognised when they’ve had errors of justice cases for Norway presented and from the UK and elsewhere in the world because we have different videos and documentaries and illustrations from our own setting. They recognise these different elements and they recognise that they have used both manipulative and coercive techniques at times also torture.  

28:05 

Actually, quite often torture, depending on which country you’re in, to gain a confession, and at the same time, when they think back on this, they will know that I’m not quite sure. They will have that question. I’m not quite sure that we actually got the right guy. So you can see that there’s a lot of doubt and they have a lot of experience so they’ve been through this many times. So I think that’s also why they instantly recognise that there’s something here.  

28:35 

And I think we lack any studies of this. But I think that, at least from my perception, when we work both Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe and the Pacific, everywhere we go these are, of course very different contexts and different countries and cultures. But at the same time, it’s almost like there’s a sort of subcultural policing, sort of a kind of mindset amongst particularly investigators because they do have the same job, they’re trying to solve the crime. And it’s a theory we have that we haven’t been able to test or prove. But it’s at least a sort of assumption that we’re making that when you start discussing methods of investigations and the tools that accompany an investigation, you’re immediately speaking within certain sort of boundaries or a kind of culture of work which is more similar than different.  

Børge Hansen: But in at the face of it.  

29:35 

You know, investigative interviewing and the way you work is open-ended questions, not leading, no coercion. And then if you’re a police detective in Vietnam or Indonesia and you have time restraints. You have lots of cases. You probably have bosses demanding and yelling at you. You want to get more stuff done faster. It’s counterintuitive, right? 

30:04 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. These are the first questions we get. So, you know, investigative interviewing places great emphasis on planning and preparation. Of course, depending on the case, it can be 5 minutes or it can take weeks. If it’s a massive case, there’s a lot of planning and preparation. If someone has stolen your bike, it’s simpler and faster. So they immediately sort of latch onto that and that’s also through training and then through retraining and further development. You know, we can talk about planning and preparation in the sense that you know that will save you time down the line. But of course the major breakthrough comes when they actually try it. 

30:52 

Because, of course, we also see examples from many different countries of things that are, well, traditional interrogations, even the use of torture, where it’s not efficient at all. It creates a lot of mistakes. It doesn’t give you the information you need. It completely destroys all trust in the police, in the state. So no one’s going to come forward, you know, no one’s going to go to the police and say I have something to tell you. You will shy away from the police as much as you can and that will hurt any kind of investigation. 

31:26 

We’ve seen examples of videos where the police officer or the investigator doesn’t even know who the suspect is. They don’t know the name. They hardly know the crime that they’re suspected of having committed. So, the conversation starts off in a very strange and bizarre way and it takes a very strange direction as well. That’s not efficiency and it’s not professionalism either.  

Børge Hansen: If you tie it back to SDG-16, which is justice. So having justice is trust in the system and the processes.  

32:09 

So, if you are convicted of a crime that you might not have done, that erodes trust. So you could say, OK, well, it seems that you’re more effective in the short term, but you know, it’s not as effective for building a society where you have less crime or more safety and stronger institutions.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah. And you can also add that there is a general trend amongst the sort of more positive trends in the world today where fewer and fewer courts will convict on the basis of a confession alone. You need more evidence. So, you know, in the past it would be enough to have the confession. It was sort of the queen of the evidence, but that’s no longer the case in more and more jurisdictions around the world.  

32:58 

So police faced that challenge as well, that if I only get the confession, it’s not enough for a conviction.  

Børge Hansen: Ok, so then sounds like it makes the job of the police harder. In some ways. 

 33:07 

Gisle Kvanvig: It does because, you know, the bar is being raised and I think that this feeds into other part of the motivation. I see several sources of motivation for the officers that we work with. And of course we’re lucky because we very often get to work with some of the best investigators and we need them on board to begin with because they are the people that sort of set the standards internally inside of the police and they are also the sort of champions of the force. So they’re being looked up to by younger colleagues. So it’s very important to get these people on board in that thinking. 

33:46 

But if you look at the motivation, it has many different sources because one key aspect of it is what we’re discussing now, which is professionalism. These people want to do a professional job. Of course, you will find plenty of examples of people who simply don’t care. And those, you know, those are not the people that we’re trying to reach, but we’re trying to reach the people that actually do care about their job. And they want to be professional investigators. They want to conduct a solid investigation.  

34:18 

They want to produce evidence and they want to have a proper trial. And so there’s a massive curriculum and there are many theories and tools for them to apply to their work. You don’t have to travel far in Europe, and you will find police that knows nothing about this at all. But this is, you know, certainly something that’s motivational. How can I be a better investigator?  

34:48 

So you have that aspect and then there’s also the sort of more human aspect, which is that we have yet to come across any officer that really enjoys using a lot of violence or even torture. Most of them will fairly quickly say that it’s the least favourite part of their job. It’s something that I have to do. It’s part of our practice. It’s just standard operating procedure that we will beat them up a little bit before we talk to them or do even worse if we don’t get the answers that we want. 

35:20 

But I don’t feel good about it. It hurts me as a human being and I just don’t feel good about myself and I don’t feel professional. So I think there is also that human dimension to the motivation as well.  

Børge Hansen: So you said you started out in Vietnam and Indonesia and this is, i’m guessing, 10 to 15 years ago.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes, this was in 2011. Yeah. 

35:50 

Børge Hansen: And where through the world has this journey taken you guys?  

Gisle Kvanvig: Well, I mean, we are too small to work everywhere, which is also a reason for why we turn to the UN because we wanted the United Nations to get on board and deliver trainings on this subject as well. So, training architecture is coming into being and gradually falling into place. It will take some time, but it’s coming and now we are working in different ways and on different levels in about 15 countries. So in Latin America, Western Africa, Ukraine here in Europe and then also several countries in Asia, so Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Asia. 

36:39 

Børge Hansen: Do you see that there are regional differences in how your message is being received and maybe even operationalised?  

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And I think that depends a lot on the crime context of the country. I mean, there’s a big difference when you look at the kind of crime they’re investigating in Indonesia, for instance, there’s a lot of corruption. Corruption is a big issue for the Indonesians. So the police officers that we started working with there very early on were from the corruption unit. If you move to Brazil it’s violent crimes or homicides. 65,000 homicides a year when we started. 

37:21 

Of course, this also has a lot to do with poverty and who’s in power, which president Brazil has. So we see the homicide rate declining now under President Lula, but at this point, it’s still an enormous homicide rate. And that means that they think differently in the sense that they need different kinds of evidence for these kinds of cases. 

37:51 

And they are, to some extent, looking for different things. So you would have as an example in Brazil, they would say that their problem is that the context they’re working with is exceedingly violent. They are very violent. There’s a lot of homicides, but there’s also a lot of police shootings. And it just means that there’s no trust between them and the citizens, which means that it’s very difficult to gather evidence through interviewing. And there’s also less of an emphasis on gathering evidence in total, which means that it hurts their prosecutions because they don’t have enough evidence to prosecute. 

38:33 

So the prosecutor will simply not accept their case. So you will have homicides or rapes or whatever they are that never go to trial. And then they will report back that, you know, through applying investigative interviewing, they get more evidence than they get more prosecutions. And that for them, of course, is important in a very professional sense.  

Børge Hansen: So the whole mix of sustainability goals need to come into play and this is an important part of that to help improve safety in the country. 

39:00 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. And thing we have to be very honest about this as well because it’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your problems. I remember meeting the chief of the homicide unit in Brazil and I think her precinct alone had 5000 homicides a year. And you know we had to be very honest and say that this is just humbling and we don’t really know how much this is going to help you. 

39:27 

I mean, what we can. But she was adamant that we need something to develop our professionalism. We need something that can help us interact with citizens in such a way that it generates more trust and we build better relations. And of course, it’s poverty-related, all this violence around us, and there are many things we can do that we as police cannot sort of know about that. 

39:57 

But you know, we have to focus on what we can do. And the morale in general is very low. We don’t feel good about ourselves and we are struggling with our relations with the local communities and we want to do better. And I see this as one avenue where we can sort of take this and we can become better at the job that we do. And that’s the part of this whole big puzzle that has to be solved. 

 40:27 

That is our responsibility.  

Børge Hansen: You mentioned another country that might not have the same issue. It’s in Brazil and poverty as a problem and you mentioned Ukraine and I know that you work quite a lot with Ukrainians. And so their problem is, obviously we all know that there’s a war going on there. Talk a little bit about the journey that you have set out together with the Ukrainians. 

41:02 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yeah, I mean, the Ukrainian cooperation is really interesting because it’s only recently that we started having much more frequent cooperation. We met them, I think, the first time we met them was back in 2017. And so, of course, I mean, for Ukrainians, the war started with the invasion of Crimea. 

Børge Hansen: Is it a consequence of the war in Crimea? Or is it other things that led up to you guys?  

41:33 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think other things because from what I recall, the first time, the first group of Ukrainians we met, they were a mix of people from the National Preventive Mechanism Against Torture, some NGO’s and also some people from the state prosecutor’s office. We met at a conference and they were, and this conference was basically about investigative interviewing. So they were very keen on this. And then we had a presentation on the work that we did in Southeast Asia at the time and that we had sort of planned doing something in Brazil. 

42:12 

And then they came to us and said, look, do you have any materials that you can share? Fortunately, we had developed something called the Convention Against Torture initiative. We developed a very short manual on investigative interviewing and we were able to send them that together with a few articles. And then we didn’t really hear from them for about a year I think. But then Asbjørn Rachlew from Oslo Police District where he was working at the time, he was invited to Kiev in 2018 to give a presentation. So he gave a sort of mini training and presentation. 

42:48 

Børge Hansen: And he’s quite vocal about interview techniques and the need for that in the Norwegian police or the journey that Norwegian police and some of the errors of justice that we’ve done in Norway. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes absolutely. So together with Ivar Fahsing, the other police officer that we have attached to our programme on a more permanent basis, Asbjørn is one of our, well, I mean it’s probably the wrong term, but he’s almost like our missionary for this. 

Børge Hansen: He’s an evangelist. 

43:18 

Gisle Kvanvig: But he went there in 2018 and then again we didn’t hear from them for very long apart from a few emails.  

Børge Hansen: But in this case, it was them inviting you. So we’re not exporting Nordic or Western European values here. They’re actually requesting them. 

Gisle Kvanvig: Yes. I mean that’s the sort of I don’t think we have exported anything since almost 2015. Since then, it’s all been requests. We have numerous countries that want assistance, but we’re not capable of it. I mean we don’t have the resources in terms of manpower and money to to support them all. 

43:59 

Børge Hansen: So why do you think the Ukrainians are inviting you guys with Asbjørn to Ukraine for to talk about these things?  

Gisle Kvanvig: The work that we’re doing with them now started in December 2022. When they first requested assistance in looking at some guidelines for interviewing prosecutors and police within the context of war crimes investigations in Ukraine. So we provided some inputs to those guidelines and we had a brief discussion and then they came back and said that look, we would really like to cooperate on training of our police and prosecutors. And of course, we said, that would be really, really interesting because it’s a very complex environment because of all these war crimes cases, 10s and 10s of thousands of them as well as just regular crime, corruption, homicide, rape and all the rest of it. 

45:09 

But what they are interested in doing and what we are sort of developing together with them is this strategy for putting in place this sort of standard of investigation and interviewing across the country both for workarounds cases but also other criminal offences.  

Børge Hansen: Because you split between war crime and other criminal offences. That means there is a difference here? 

Gisle Kvanvig: There is a difference. And I think first and foremost what most people have to remember about war crimes is that the likelihood that most of these cases will be prosecuted is very low. Now, unfortunately, collecting evidence and war crimes cases is notoriously difficult. 

45:53 

But interviewing, interestingly enough, if done correctly, can help in the sense that you can secure better evidence because, very often, the crime scene is non-existent. I mean it’s a bomb site for instance. So of course you can take pictures of it and so on. But again it’s hard and the crimes are different and even rape within the context of war, it will be hard to get the forensics that you need and so on and so forth. But you can have interviews with victims and witnesses and if they are done correctly it means that you stand a better chance of collecting evidence that will stand the test of trial and done in the wrong way. 

46:40 

Particularly if you use what we normally see in the context of war crimes is that people use a lot of photos and videos because they’re everywhere and the second that these are spread either on the Internet or you start showing these pictures around you’re contaminating the evidence. So that will basically destroy your chances in court. Which is another reason why there are so few convictions in this kind of war crimes cases that simply the evidence is either deemed not trustworthy, so it’s excluded from the chain of evidence or is nonexistent. 

47:17 

Børge Hansen: The hardship in Ukraine, it’s you know they’re in the middle of a war and they’re also retraining themselves as you said with new practises and I’m guessing also legislation to support this. And then the amount of war crime cases and regular criminal cases are just growing immensely right now, because there’s the war is still going on. 

47:42 

If we go back to the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, it started out with understanding or having an understanding of how the Norwegian police worked, and it tried to learn from that and take it. Are there any learnings from around the world that you guys have fed back to Norway, the UK, and the other countries where this has been a practice for a while now? 

 48:06 

Gisle Kvanvig: Absolutely. I think it’s continuous because what’s so fascinating to see now is that more and more countries, jurisdictions, and police services are engaging with this. You know, they’re driving innovation at a speed that didn’t happen before because you would have basically the UK, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, very, very few countries that were engaged in the field of research and practise around the investigative interviewing. 

48:37 

Suddenly, you’re looking at massive countries like Brazil, Nigeria, which is coming up as another very, very large country. You’re looking at South Asia, a country like Pakistan where they’re working with this. I know there’s interest in India and Indonesia 300 million people. So suddenly, you have a lot more brains engaged in this whole field both on the research side but also on the practice side.  

49:08 

And I think that we learn from each other, we borrow both from Norwegian police, but also we get to borrow police officers from the UK. And I think that what they also feel is that there is a sort of proper exchange of competence and experience and that this is driving development forward. 

Børge Hansen: So for Giesle and Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, what’s up next? 

49:39 

Gisle Kvanvig: I think what’s up next for us, in particular, is the gender dimension of what we’re doing. We’re sort of studying it now and looking to expand on it. And again we’re looking at present, we’re looking at some of the research that we can find on gender based violence like rape or abusive relationships, domestic violence, abuse of children, these sort of crimes. And then looking at if there are better ways of investigating those kinds of crimes. And there’s some very interesting research and there are some very interesting pilots on this around the world and it’s all based on the same skill set that investigative interviewing teaches.  

50:30 

So you need investigative interviewing to also enhance your relationship violence investigations and I think that’s what we’re going to see if we can incorporate in different ways because the very initial training, investigative interviewing training cannot encompass too many things. It cannot be too ambitious, but at least you know you can have an illustration of the different topics and specialisations available. Like there’s specialisation on interviewing children. 

51:01 

There’s enhanced cognitive interviewing in terms of interviewing traumatised people or people suffering from memory loss and then you could also have a particular field on gender-based violence, rape and and the sexual abuse of children. 

51:21 

Børge Hansen: I think we were lucky to have yourself and your team working on these things and helping to drive these initiatives throughout the world. So thank you very much. Gisle, thank you for being on the podcast.  

Gisle Kvanvig: Thank you for having me. 

51:35 

Børge Hansen: Thank you for joining us. In this episode, we learned how Norwegian Centre for Human Rights is working towards promoting fair trials for people across the world. Thanks for tuning in to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt from Rebel in the Centre of Oslo with me. Børge Hansen. Catch you in the next episode. 

Transcript

Davidhorn  

Hi everyone, I’m Børge Hansen, CEO of Davidhorn and welcome to the second episode of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. We are absolutely thrilled to have an incredible conversation hosted by Dr. Ivar Fahsing with Prof. Juan Méndez the legendary human rights advocate and former UN Special Rapporteur on torture. 

 We caught up with Prof. Mendez in New York during the launch of the groundbreaking UN Manual on Investigative Interviewing for Criminal Investigations. 

 Get ready to deep dive as we explore Prof. Méndez’s pivotal role in creating guidelines that align police interviewing techniques with human rights standards. We’ll discuss the ethics of modern policing, and we’ll reinforce the absolute ban on torture. It’s an inspiring and fascinating conversation you don’t want to miss. 

Let’s get started. 

Ivar Fahsing 

We are meeting at the launch the new UN manual on investigative interviewing for a number of police chiefs from around the world. And I remember… 

You have to correct me if I’m quoting you wrong now, but when this manual was validated in November, you were part of that validation meeting.  

Juan Méndez  

Yep.  

Ivar Fahsing 

And I remember you said something like this, that. I think initially I said that if it wasn’t for the Méndez principles, it would be harder to get this UN manual. But then you said something that you kind of turned it around and said, the manual validates the principles. So I was thinking that could be an interesting start of the conversation. If you agree, if I’m quoting you correctly? 

Juan Méndez 

I think you are. In my experience, at least, you know, I first published my report to the General Assembly, it was my last report because my term was coming to an end. And I had consulted with a number of people before writing the report. And on that occasion, I called for a protocol because that was my, you know, my legal bias to call it a protocol. 

But the idea was to have a set of guidelines that the police could use to make the work more effective, but also more compliant with the international human rights standards. And particularly the standard of the absolute prohibition of torture, of psychological torture, and of any coercion. Because all of that is part of international law. 

And that immediately when that report was published and discussed at the General Assembly, this is October. And we got such a good reception, in part because we had calls on some very good specialists to do the early consultation that helped me draft the report and among them Asbjørn Rachlew, Mark Fallon, a lot of very good people. And so we already had an audience. I mean, they had been part of it to begin with, but the UN police actually picked up on it very early. 

There was so much interest that we had a meeting about how to, you know, take it from there and produce something along the lines of what I had suggested we needed. And the UN police was there from day one. 

As it happened, I didn’t know about it, but they were also working on what is now the UN police manual. 

And as we worked on our principles, there were parallel contacts between UN police and us. And so the ideas were very much shared. I mean, we all agreed that we needed a set of guidelines and that the set of guidelines should be based on the 30 or 40 years experience of people who had looked at this and had published and researched about how good police work can be done that is compliant with human rights standards, guarantees all the safeguards that suspects should have in a democratic police environment or criminal justice environment and at the same time provides a positive and affirmative vehicle for police to do its work more effectively than relying on coercion and things like that that have been proven to be counterproductive.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Absolutely. So if you look at the relationship then between the Méndez principles can be seen more as a policy document on a national level. 

Juan Méndez 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Whilst the UN manual for how to do interviews is more a guidelines for practitioners.  

Juan Méndez 

Yes. Well, I mean, the principles that we decided in the steering committee and the advisory group, you know, we took about 100 people involved in this exercise and took us about four years. We decided to distill the fundamental principles of methodology that has already been proven to be the right one and has been studied also. So we basically did not want to adopt one standard or, you know, this is the way the Norwegian police does it or the British police does it. We kind of condensed and distilled the fundamental principles knowing that that is not enough to be a training manual. That a training manual has to observe those principles but go beyond them and have much more in the way of methodologies of training and even details about where to sit and how to approach the first questions and then wait for answers, things like that. 

What we were trying to accomplish, it was not necessary to get into all those details. But we also recognize that our principles require the drafting of manuals or proper training of police and particularly of people conducting interviews. In the case of the UN police, they decided to go into more detail, among other things, because the UN Police Manual is like a minimum standard that all contributing police forces have to agree to before they can join peacekeeping operations, for example, and things like that. So in their case, they have to be more detailed and more specific. 

I think they also benefit from experiences that were already there from literature and training exercises that the Norwegian Center for Human Rights has been conducting for years that of course were beyond what we were trying to accomplish. But I think it was a good coincidence that they were working on something as a kind of minimum standard, but more detailed. And we were working on something that eventually could be considered a sort of non-binding legal instrument, to judge whether, you know, in interviews with suspects, with witnesses, and with victims, was conducted appropriately under, you know, kind of standards that could universalized.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Exactly. I think you’re right. I think that’s like my good friend, Asbjørn sometimes like to say is that when you take away a tool from a petitioner, no matter if it’s illegal, it was his tool. So you have to replace it with something that they can use. 

Juan Méndez 

Yeah, I heard Asbjørn say you have to give the policeman alternatives. Yes and alternatives that are human rights compliant, but that are also more effective. So you have to start by understanding what the whole purpose of the interview is. And I also heard Asbjørn say the purpose of the interview is to get to the truth. It’s not to obtain a confession, it’s to get to the truth. And to get to the truth while also observing all the procedural guarantees and safeguards. 

And I think that’s exactly what we are trying to do with this. 

Ivar Fahsing  

We have discarded the word truth also, actually.  

Juan Méndez 

Really?  

Ivar Fahsing 

Because very often when that’s put into practice, that ends up with the police version of the truth. They think they already know the truth. Yes. And they just want you to confirm. So we were at, and this was very important when we did this kind of change in Norway 25 years ago was to say that purpose is to gather accurate and reliable information with relevance to the matter of investigation. So every time they came up some kind of deviant idea, you just kind of matched it towards the purpose. Will this foster accurate and reliable and lawful at behavior or will it do the opposite?  

Juan Méndez 

Exactly. That’s why in our principles we talk a lot about avoiding confirmation bias, because you’re absolutely right that perhaps people who conduct interviews pursuant to the old model think that they are after the truth but they’re after the truth that they already think they know instead of letting the facts inform.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Exactly. So that’s, it was actually something that just came to us. We didn’t actually really have this strategy about not talking about the truth, but in the end, we just found out that, well, neither lies or truth are really productive way because it’s black and white and it’s probably beyond what you can expect to find in investigation. In investigation, it’s more shades of gray. Which stories are receiving most consistent support and are coherent? With most of the sources of evidence. And is that coherence strong enough that you can say it goes beyond a reasonable doubt. So this is the way we just naturally found out we need to have this new way of thinking about what the purpose is. And that was so useful because everybody agreed on that purpose. And then we can just use that every time you came to a difficult discussion: well, will this help this purpose or not? Now that we have agreed on this, that was very valuable for us. 

I was thinking, Juan, since, you know, you’re not really a fan of the fact that the principles now mostly are referred to as the Méndez principles. The principles real name is the principle for effective interviewing and information gathering. Nevertheless, you played a very important role in creating this set of principles. And that’s mostly what people talk about when it comes to Juan Méndez. But I know that you have been in this game or business for a very long time. And I wondered if it was possible for you to tell a little bit about how did it come around that you actually spent so much of your life in these questions.  

Juan Méndez 

I was studying law in Argentina when we were undergoing a certain, you know, period, one of many periods of turmoil in my country. And there were military dictatorships, not as bad as the last one, but not good either. And there were resistance movements and movements using political violence and the response to them was very harsh. And it included torture, very, very significant torture. Not openly and always on denial, but not even making a big effort to deny the torture. And this was true of all of South America and perhaps of other parts of the world as well. 

And if you were a law student at that was particularly intent on finding a solution to the use of torture. And of course, my first interest was to combat torture as used against a political opponent. 

It became very clear that it was used against common crime offenders or even suspects of common crime offenders as frequently and even as violently and as brutally as enemies. So, you know, many people in my generation made it a big, you know, kind of north of our activity to combat torture and to combat first by denouncing it and then illustrating methodologies and things like that and insisting of course on legal prohibitions. 

Denunciations and publicity around them probably played some role but as the political crisis became worse and worse, there was, it was not enough to, to even diminish the incidence of torture. And it came to a point where, you know, you, I and other lawyers and some of us recently graduated lawyers started taking up defenses of people who were accused of crimes against the state and the like. And we felt that one important way to do it was to investigate and denounce the possibility that they had been tortured in order to confess or to obtain evidence against others, etc. And so it was very much a part of our legal strategy to investigate torture. And in, for example, in my hometown, we discovered a couple of places that were kind of like torture settings. 

They were mostly recreational areas that the police used for themselves for the time. On Sundays, they went with their families. But during the week, because they were kind of secluded and outside, they used them as torture chambers. And of course, we discovered them because common crime offenders came to us and told us. 

This, you want to find a place, this is where it is. And we actually went with a judge, and we found torture instruments and everything. And so that put us kind of in the limelight. And so at some point I was arrested myself and of course they tortured me as well, you know. And this was already under the latest dictatorship where not only torture, but disappearance of persons and extrajudicial executions became much more rampant. And I was very lucky that they didn’t have much on me. They tortured me, but they didn’t know what to ask, but so I was able at least to sleep at night knowing that I didn’t offer evidence or even information or intelligence against anybody else to suffer the same fate. And besides, my family and my friends who were lawyers like me worked very diligently and put a stop to my torture early enough so that I didn’t have to suffer as much as others on that same stage. But then I went to prison for about a year and a half, and I was not charged with any crime, but I was held under the state of emergency. And a lot of the people who were there with me had the same torture happening to because I was the lawyer and they wanted to consult me about how to improve their procedural situation in the criminal case against. 

I learned of all kinds of methods of torture and how you can fight them and things like that. And so, when I left Argentina, and I was allowed to leave relatively early compared to other people who were still in prison, and I landed in the United States, I started to try to help the people who were left behind in Argentina. 

It became a sort of a natural aspect of my human rights work to work against torture. And then I worked for like 15 years for Human Rights Watch and we did a lot of different things but some of them had to do with torture of course and documenting it in our reports. 

But actually, I became much more focused on torture when I became the Special Rapporteur, many, many years, many decades later. But yeah, I mean, I came to it through this circuitous route and kind of long route, but of course my predecessors in the Rapporteurship and my successors in the Rapporteurship have come at it from different angles. As far as I know, none of them were themselves victims of torture, but they are doing excellent. They were doing and are doing excellent work combating torture as well. 

Ivar Fahsing 

You say when I became the special Rapporteur, that for me that is a very, very special position. How do you want to become that? How did that happen for you?  

Juan Méndez 

Well, in my case, this was 2010. And by then the Human Rights Council had been already created and the whole way of appointing people to the different special procedures as they’re called uniform. And so when an opening was there, and Manfred Nowart, who was my immediate predecessor, his second term was coming to an end, can’t hold the position for more than two terms of three years each. So the Human Rights Council actually opened the process of asking people to suggest names or to apply themselves. And three NGOs from the South, from Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, suggested my name. And because I had been, for many years, working with Human Rights Watch then with the International Center for Transitional Justice. Then I was at the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights. And I actually had been Kofi Annan’s Special Advisor on Prevention of Genocide. So my background seemed interesting. And so they appointed me. 

Ivar Fahsing 

I see. So what do a special Rapporteur actually do?  

Juan Méndez 

Well, it’s one of several different thematic Rapporteurships. You know, there’s ex -traditional executions, disappearances, you know, women’s rights. There’s many different, like 40 -some thematic Rapporteurships. 

Torture is one of the oldest ones. It was created back in 1985, I believe. It was the third one of a thematic nature that was created. The first one is the Working Group on Disappearances. The second one is a Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions. And the third is a Special Rapporteur on Torture. And before me, there was several, you know, Northern European jurists, very highly respected people who did wonderful work. 

The four people who preceded me had done such very good work that it was possible to exercise the mandate with just following the path that they had, you know, kind of created for it. 

It’s a mandate that has a lot of credibility because torture is one of those issues that not even the countries that do torture accept that they do. It is kind of a tribute to how well established the prohibition on torture is that many countries practice it but none recognize that they do acknowledge that they do so they use euphemisms they say it’s all a lie it doesn’t happen it’s not true, but the fact is that at least they don’t defend it and that’s already a good starting point now of course. 

What my predecessors and I and my successors also have done is to try to apply the prohibition of torture to what the convention says about what constitutes torture. And that includes many different settings and situations and things like that. But in my experience, the setting in which most torture happens, and it’s the most brutal, is in the interrogation phases at the beginning of detention and inquiries into crime, and in my six years, I saw this happen in third world countries, middle-level and highly developed countries, there’s always some excuse for why. You know some harsh treatment is needed. They don’t put torture but enhance interrogation is what the US government said during the global war on terror, for example. The thing is that it’s still prohibited. No matter what the circumstances and what the crisis is, it still shouldn’t be done. And it does seem to happen because of what your colleagues have long studied as a confirmation bias. 

What really happened and you just need the evidence of it. And if the evidence comes in the form of a confession, that’s the best piece of evidence possible. And that’s why we have so many judicial errors and so many unfair convictions and that then proved to be completely impossible. And so coming up with a better way of doing the inquiries is perhaps the best tool that we have for preventing torture. 

Ivar Fahsing 

Absolutely, I completely agree. When we do training around the world we have created a case. We have got police officers and I guess all of us, we learn better by storytelling and cases than just lecturing.  

Juan Méndez 

Examples. 

Ivar Fahsing 

Exactly. So we have created a case of a missing person case. And I used the missing person because I know that that is the case that have the most possible explanations. It can be nothing. This missing girl can just be sitting in the garage smoking a joint. But she didn’t want to tell her parents. So she’s not missing at all. Or she can have runaway, or dramatic way, or non -dramatic way, or it can be all the way under spectrum to a rape and murder, or kidnapping, trafficking, or whatever. So there are many possibilities here. 

But very often, and I kind of fueled it, gave some suspicion in the case towards the fact that she was a Kurdish girl and that there had been some problems with her dad. And voila, most of the officers are stuck on the idea that the dad did it. To the degree where one of the Norwegian detectives who was in the sample actually said, the dad did it, lock him up and throw away the key. 

Juan Méndez 

Yeah 

Ivar Fahsing 

So I think you’re absolutely right that police officers very often have this guilt presumption that’s effective for them. After all, that’s a job to look after crime. Yeah. And we have it somewhere you can understand it that they have the more that has also what that’s rewarded. 

If you solve crimes, you’re good. If it isn’t a crime, well, there’s no use for you. So it’s an interesting how this really easily can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Juan Méndez 

And there’s so much pressure on the police officer to solve crime, quote unquote, that it’s understandable that they cut corners. And even if they don’t think they’re cutting corners, 

If someone is kind of intimidated by the whole surroundings, and then says, I’ll tell you everything, you just take everything. That’s why I really like this decision by the Supreme Court of Brazil issued a few days ago. Because the majority opinion states very about lower court judges, it’s not a matter of the presumption of truth by what the police says or the presumption that all suspects are always lying to improve their situation. 

In both cases, you have to have corroborating evidence. And if you don’t have corroborating evidence, you’re not doing your job. You cannot just rely on what is said. 

I really think that that is a useful thing. I really like the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine because it does put a lot of pressure on the police to do the right thing and to look for evidence and not to, you know, it actually excludes evidence that may have been formally obtained in the correct way, but it originates on an illegal way of finding. Anyway, I think the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine is already law in other jurisdictions, but it’s not international.  

Ivar Fahsing 

No, not at all. 

Juan Méndez 

No, I mean the Convention Against Torture does mandate the exclusion of the confession, but it doesn’t mandate the exclusion of successive evidence. Not yet, anyway.  

Ivar Fahsing 

I remember also one of the guys who inspired me when I was starting this work together with Asbjørn in Norway 25 years ago was the reading by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren? 

Juan Méndez 

Yeah, of course.  

Ivar Fahsing 

I think that was back in 59. Where he said something that, well, one thing about these involuntary confessions is of course their inherent untruthfulness. But the more problematic, even more problematic thing about it is the fact that officers of the law are systematically bridging the law to uphold the law and then in the end it becomes a bigger problem, the problem they actually try to fight. That’s a very well good way of putting it.  

Juan Méndez 

Absolutely. I mean, I agree those of us living in the global South where, you know, the state is always underfunded and even the police is underfunded You can understand how they think that they’re upholding the law by breaking the law and then it becomes a vicious circle, you know and the the tolerance for tolerant before torture becomes tolerance for corruption as well. And so, you know, the police tortures the people who don’t have the wherewithal to, you know, bribe them. But they look the other way with very serious crimes when the money is cannot rely on police forces that are so inherently broken down that way. And starting to find a way for the police to recover their standing in society, the respect of the citizenry that they need to have in order to do their job well. Because as I always say, I mean, a police that tortures intimidate a population, but it doesn’t enjoy their confidence. So they cannot really rely on cooperation because they only rely on intimidation. 

Ivar Fahsing 

And they are deemed to become a paracast in their own country.  

Juan Méndez 

Yeah, or at least they have a very bad reputation. You know, the people suspect that everything that they do is wrong, and at least under suspect motivations, things like that. And that also, you know, kind of this kind of discredit transfers to the whole criminal justice system.  

Ivar Fahsing 

Exactly. 

Juan Méndez 

Where people start guessing that everything that the prosecutors and the judges do also has some illegal motivation behind. And it’s a vicious circle that’s very difficult to break. But I think starting with a methodology for investigating crime, that gets better results while at the same time respecting the complying with prohibitions on ill treatment. It’s probably one angle to start to recover this kind of civic trust. 

Ivar Fahsing 

I would just like to ask you one final question from it is, you know, you have been working with this for a very, very long time. And I’ve been working with it for around 25 years. And sometimes I feel, Ivar, are you a little bit naive thinking that these small efforts that we try to do can actually make this a better world? Do you sometimes think that? 

Juan Méndez 

Yeah, of course I think about it. I think in fact that, but I prefer to be called naive than to be called tolerant with their injustice. So I have to keep the faith that there are ways of improving, you know, in discrete and limited aspects, but improving the circumstances that we live in, that because the alternative is to just surrender and think that justice cannot ever be achieved. And in the meantime, I also feel that even for everybody who calls me naive that torture is not inherently necessary in the investigation of crime, I can come back with examples of saying, but look, it results in injustices, it results in, you know, in the justice system having to, you know, throw everything out and release people, maybe people who should not be released, but you’re prejudging and harming the justice system by using, you know, illegal means. And also, and I always insist on this larger point, that for the state to function effectively, and particularly the criminal justice system to function effectively, both the court system, the prosecutors, and the police, have to enjoy the confidence and the civic trust of the population that they serve. And if you jeopardize it by using illegal means, you’re actually doing a disservice to your own mission. 

Ivar Fahsing 

Thanks a lot. 

Juan Méndez 

No, thank you. Great conversation.