Coercion without contact: New technologies and the boundaries of torture

This editorial revisits Internet and Communications Ill-Treatment and Torture in light of generative AI, biometric surveillance, spyware, automated inference, neurotechnology, and platform-based coercion. It asks how new technologies reshape the boundaries between coercion, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and torture.

The paper uses conceptual analysis, typology-building, and normative human rights interpretation, informed by a purposive interdisciplinary review.

The editorial proposes a three-layer framework organised around the human need under attack, the method through which harm is produced, and the site where coercion occurs. It identifies three overlapping domains: mental-directed interventions, social control, and social influence. Across scenarios including technologically assisted interrogation, protest policing, e-carceration, border governance, armed conflict, and digital authoritarianism, the analysis shows that technologically mediated coercion may produce severe suffering without direct physical contact. Harms may arise through surveillance, exposure, radical uncertainty, reputational destruction, isolation, automated exclusion, manipulation of perception, and induced vulnerability. The paper argues that severity should be assessed cumulatively and contextually, including impacts on agency, identity, relational life, collective belonging, and conditions of existence. It also highlights the difficulty of attribution when states, companies, platforms, vendors, data brokers, and automated systems jointly produce coercive environments. Existing human rights frameworks remain relevant but require doctrinal refinement, stronger accountability tools, and better methods for documenting diffuse, opaque, and collective harms.

Torture and ill-treatment do not end where screens begin; technological mediation requires updated legal, clinical, and evidentiary frameworks.