TWO-LANE BLACKTOP: REFUGEES & TORTURE

The right not to be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the right of asylum have, individually considered, an extensive field of application", but it is possible to point out some traits in common. Firsty, in both rights undelie the moral spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, according to the recent reports of the main human rights organisations, both rights are in deep political crisis. Furthermore, is possible to see that sometimes they cross each other: there is a triple «zone of intersection between the right of asylum and the right not to suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment: one of the reasons for escaping from a country is to avoid suffering torture ("refuge after torture") secondly, sometimes inhuman and degrading treatment occur precisely in the process of seeking asylum ("inhuman treatment in the refuge"), finally, there are countries with strong deficiencies in their immigration policies and this can produce a perverse effect: the transfer of potential asylum seekers to countries where they are at risk of torture or inhuman treatment again ("torture or inhuman and degrading treatment after asylum").


I. INTRODUCTION
Both the right not to suffer torture or the right to asylum have, individually considered, case-by-case, broad fields of application.Torture is, unfortunately, a very widespread reality and, at the same time, the reasons of the refugees to escape from their countries are very varied.
However, there are at least two common notes between them that allow us to understand and approach them together.Firstly, we can agree that both are at the center of the big concerns that allowed historically the main human rights declarations since 1948.Neither asylum nor the interdiction of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment are just two more human rights among others, but rather they synthesize very well the core of the essential worries of the issue of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent Covenants: the imposition of a better world committed with the legal and political demands derived from the fundamental budget of the whole catalog of human rights: the human dignity.
The second common note is the existence of a zone of intersection between the right of asylum and the right not to suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.This intersection belongs to the normative configurations of both rights as well to the real, empirical field of their effectiveness (the physical space where rights violations are committed).This can be understood in a triple way: firstly, the crossroads of both rights is due to the fact that one of the reasons for escaping from a country is precisely to avoid suffering torture in it ("refuge after torture" as we could call that encounter); Secondly, -and this is already a real feature of our present time-: inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, occur precisely in the process of seeking asylum ("inhuman treatment in the refuge"); A last area of intersection results from the fact that there are countries with strong deficiencies in their immigration policies and this can produce a perverse effect: the transfer of potential asylum seekers to countries where they are at risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment ("torture or inhuman and degrading treatment after asylum").
But let us begin with their common nature and similar destinies.

II.1. A pretty similar starting point
The right to asylum and the right to be free from torture have a common feature: both were part of the deepest believes and raison d'être of the World Declaration of Human Rights (1948).The prohibition of torture is, in a political philosopher Ronald Dworkin's fine expression, «a fixed point in the moral universe», but in addition, and as professor Javier De Lucas recalled a few years ago with regard to the extension of torture into democracy, the experience of that destructive capacity which can reach the policy of instrumental torture, was so serious that the malheur de conscience of the twentieth century, which the very birth of the UN has as one of its priority objectives, for the purpose of eradicating it.
In the twentieth century there were so many cases of systematic cruelty, including experimentation with human beings, that this explains percetly the need, not only for the right not to be tortured, but also for the emphasis on its absolute character.The right not to be tortured is reflected in article 5 of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and article 7 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".Both torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment are prohibited practices at all times and in all places, even in times of war.
On an ethical perspective, the moral conviction that a human being can not be tortured by other human beings was, at a moment of our intellectual history (a zig.zag civilizatory process), so powerful, that it spread in the most important juridical texts and endowed, for that reason, of the most serious of the binding legal forces.The prohibition of torture is still (these are times when it must be remembered) a rule of ius cogens integrated at the bottom of the big principles that reflect superior values that bind the whole humanity.The moral and legal imperative -do not torture, any time, anywhere, in any circumstances-is mandated by the UN convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency," says the convention, can "be invoked as a justification of torture."All the declarations of rights stand out their absolute character: there are no exceptions.
That same compromise affects the meaning of the principle of non-refoulement as regards the right of asylum: no person should be sent back to a country where he or she may be subjected to torture.Such a prohibition against repatriation is set out in Article 33.1 of the 1951 Geneva Convention.It is an essential guarantee of the right of asylum: No contracting state may, by expulsion or refoulement, place a refugee in any borders of territories where their life or freedom is endangered because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or their political opinions.Although there are exceptions on security and final conviction for serious crimes, the fact is that the principle of non-refoulement has evolved into an absolute standard, there are no exception or derogation2 With regard to the real effectiveness of the right of asylum, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has developed a large number of documents in recent decades to adapt protection mechanisms to new dynamics of persecution.It has also done so on theoretical currents for the recognition of refugee status in situations of danger to life or physical and mental integrity not contemplated at the time of its promulgation.In all these cases, the principle of non-refoulement is a fundamental component of the customary prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. 3 fact, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment prohibits (Article 3.1.)states parties to expel, return or extradite a person to another state "where there are reasonable grounds to believe that they would be in danger of being subjected to torture".In this sense, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled (Soering case) that the prohibition of art. 3 of the European Convention against ill-treatment "is also absolute with regard to expulsión".According to the Human Rights Committee, "it would be unreasonable to interpret the responsibility of States under the terms of article 2 of the Covenant (referring to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which refers to the commitment to respect and guarantee it) In such a way as to enable them to perpetrate violations of the pact in the territory of another State which they could not perpetrate in their own territory".That is to say, the European Court of Human Rights has interpreted the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment as prohibiting States which have ratified the Convention not only from inflicting torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, But also to send asylum seekers to countries where there is a real risk of such treatment or of being sent back to others where that danger is predictable.
In short, if both rights summed up well the wide ethical convictions of the second half of the twentieth century (at least in its first decades) was by a serie of strong believes probably based on the recent memory of a nameless atrocities and te consequent need to protect not only life or phisical integrity of the human being, but also his dignity.And there is no greater affront to this dignity than the impossibility of finding refuge in the world or that humna being´s "reification" that we call "torture".We can go even further, after analyzing the recent arguments that claim the lawfulness of torture, professor La Torre has developed the thesis that there is a conceptual connection between torture and illegality, a phenomenological contradiction between law and torture4 .At the same time, all the organizations committed to the defense of human rights insist today in a fact: the legal status of refugees is obligatory for all States that form the international system of law, established in the Geneva Convention and in the Protocol of New York.

II.2. A commom destiny
I think it is possible to agree that there are two human rights that are in global crisis today: the right to asylum and the right not to suffer torture.The importance of each of them is such that this crisis climate can also be understood as a crisis of political institutions, that is, as a political crisis.
Regarding the first, and as Javier de Lucas has been insisting for more than a decade, asylum and refuge rights are not one of the catalog of rights, but are at the core of any political project that respects human rights.That is why the current 'refugee crisis' can be understood as the EU crisis as a political project: a common area of freedom, security and justice, chaired by the theorical notion of human rights 5 .The International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 3,770 refugees and migrants died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe6 , at the same time, we are witnessing an strong retreat in the "defense" of tradiitonal national borders with sospicious xenophobic arguments As far as torture is concerned, scandals such the so-called "CIA flights" 7 together with the impunity in the well known Abu Ghraib 8 and Guantanamo cases 9 , the success of the populist «ticking bomb» argument 10 , or the very existence of secret detention centers in Europe give an idea of the scope of the serious implications to which we referred earlier.
So, definitively, one of the issues that brings the destiny of the prohibition of torture closer to the norms on asylum is a common basic crisis (a type of political crisis) concretized in the lack of seriousness with which they are assumed the legal and political obligations arising from the legal nature of both rights.Furthermore, the future seems even worse 11 : it is not posible to measure exactly the consequences 12 of this "emptying", again in the words of De Lucas, 13 in which national policies overlap political ideals, but also supranational commitments (those of the United States vis-a-vis the UN, those of the member states vis-a-vis EU).
Both the attacks of 11 September and the EU "refugee crisis" of recent years seem to have allowed, in a context of urgency and exceptionality, the idea that it is possible for the goverments to avoid taking on the basic demands of these two human rights developed in a historical phase of extraordinary consensus.Accordingly, both the right not to suffer torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, as well as the requirements of the right of asylum, could be redesigned by the existence of contexts of exceptionality (defined as such by the political actors themselves) Which will allow them to no longer ignore the regulative ideal or "ethical encouragement" of them, but rather the basic political and juridical implications derived from their binding force.
So, the actuality of both rights is quite similar: both are in a critical situation.The years after the September 11 attacks allows establishing a genuine global network that, in the shelter of the fight against terror, includes a complex structure of dark detention centers where human rights violations are fragrant and impunity including inhuman treatment and torture14 .Moreover, even before the Ankara agreement, it seems to be a kind of «rights local markets» whose message to the population is that there is no longer any space safeguarded by the human rights system that is not susceptible to give in to short time political and economic interests of the rulers of national states, the populist parties´s pression 15 and, apparently, also the worst demandings of their voters.
Our time should be characterized as being an historical phase of human rights way in which the protagonism would rest on the empirical work and the statistics 16 .The essence of this phase should be the development of the priority of the measurament 17 , material means, tools and guarantees for the effectiveness (or real effectiveness) of human rights. 18However, we are facing a setback that seems to be far behind the starting point.In the first case (the right not to suffer torture or inhuman or degrading treatment), rather than a stagnation of the traditional format of its prevention (another form of real effectiveness), the main feature seems to be the revision of the foundations of non-exceptionality.One of the key questions is whether states can use methods of "coercive interrogation" that do not qualify as torture.On the issue of regulation, there are those -Alan Dershowitz, for example-who believe that banning torture and coercion outright is unrealistic.Instead, Dershowitz said, the practice should be regulated by court warrants. 19In our opinión, all these positions are part of an immoral debate 20 (quite truculent, to be honest), including the wrong and dangerous expression "war on terror".As Michael Ignatieff wrote the judicialisation of torture, and of coercive interrogation techniques involving stress and duress, physical abuse, sleep deprivation and so on, could lead to torture and coercion becoming routine rather than an exception 21 .That is, a position in favour of outright prohibition of both torture and coercive interrogation has gained strength from the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and from the memos of the office of legal counsel and the White House parsing the torture convention into permission for coercive interrogation.It seems clear from the dire experience of Abu Ghraib that outright prohibition of both torture and coercive interrogation is the only way to proceed.
That is to say, the traditional main problem concerning the effectiveness of the right not to be tortured had been the continued existence of torture in the world, but nowadays, we can add new justifications in a worrying path of exceptionality (excepcionalities), trivialization and/or strange normalization (including legalization) of torture practices.According to Amnesty International's most recent report, during the past five years torture has been reported in 141 countries.In addition, 2015 has been the first year in which torture has spread as much as in World War II.Immediately linked to the extent of the crime of torture, we find the question of its impunity.The diagnosis is worrying in itself, but it also translates into population movements, exodus that have as main motive truly terrifying situations: threats of murder, torture, imprisonment without guarantees, enforced disappearances, etc.
Finally, if we want to highlight the novelties in the area of conjunction of both rights (and the assets that are protected with them), another feature that points to a common destination is the fact that both torture and asylum are affected by another legal novelty: the rise of private actors in human rights violations 22 .The Convention against Torture definition contains a requirement that the actor be a public official or other person acting in an official capacity but there are facts that allow a new trend in the jurisprudence of the Committee against Torture, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee to admit a wider reading of 'the actor' in international human rights law 23 .We refer to the open cases against international corporations for human rights violations that point in particular to the crime of torture as well as forced displacement (basically in the case of Land grabbing24 ).These facts are not isolated but integrated in a more general trend 25 and if we had to indentify some specific cases, among them would be the hiring of mercenaries and private forces in the conflicts that the US maintains in Iraq and other countries in the zone («Blackwater case» and others 26 ), while on the otthe side (dealing with refugees) we could talk about the increasing business of illegal people trafficking.That is, there is a final convergence that has to do with what the Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen studies as "power issues arising from the globalization process": there are more and more populations displaced or imprisoned, more destruction of the land, etc.And this explains why at the origin there is a complex knot of private institutions and systems that we do not know still well, even when this causes the blurring between refugee and economic immigrant as well as their gradual loss of semantic relevance. 27

III. FROM TORTURE TO ASYLUM SEEKING
Daily, millions of refugees and migrants fleeing war and persecution in countries like Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar and Iraq suffer intolerable misery and human rights violations 28 .Refugees are people who have had to flee their country because of armed conflict, serious human rights abuses or persecution and the threat of inhuman treatment or torture is one of the traditional motives for fleeing a country.In recent years the number of people forced to seek refuge in a third state due to this scourge (torture) growing especially in unstable territories and areas of conflict, has increased.
According to UNHCR, more than 60 million people have left their countries or become displaced; although the reasons why people migrate remain diverse and often complex, the truth is that there are thousands of people running away from abuses and crimes such as torture.Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, Iraq and Eritrea are countries with extraordinary human rights deficits, in particular, as regards torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.
In Syria, according to recent reports by the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, government forces and non-state armed groups committed countless war crimes and enforced disappearances with impunity.Between 2011 and 2015, thousands of deaths were in custody due to torture.The Islamic State armed group imposed sieges and attacks with chemical weapons in civilian areas.There are already 400,000 more dead, 7.6 million internally displaced persons and 4.6 million refugees in other countries.
In general terms, the refugees who are arriving to Europe at the moment, come from territories with a high level of conflict and violence.In addition to the Syrian refugees, there are a significant number of Afghans and Iraqis who also try to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.The hell of torture is particularly aberrant and scandalous in another country where refugees come from, Eritrea, where, in addition, young people are forced into military service similar to slavery.
In Eritrea, since the dictatorship was hardened in 2008, some 50,000 people have fled the country to Europe or Israel.According to the UN, some 3,000 people are trying to flee every month.By the end of 2014, the organization had registered 48,400 Eritrean asylum applications in 44 industrialized countries.In the last decade, about 305,000 Eritreans (5% of the population) have fled.The Eritreans form the second group, behind the Syrians, who cross from North Africa to Europe by boat, and in recent months hundreds of them have died in the attempt.
But that already leads us to the second intersection: when suffering, due to serious human rights violations, occurs in the search for refuge or in the arrival to the country on which asylum depends.

IV. TORTURE (INHUMAN AND DEGRADING TREATMENT) IN THE SEEK FOR ASYLUM
A second area of very wide intersection is characterized by inhuman and degrading treatment in the search for asylum and refugee reception.Amnesty International has described many human rights violations (including torture and abuses) in transit; recentely many refugees and migrants in Italy in 2016 have described thir journeys, facing abuse at every stage from their arrival in Libya until they reached the Mediterranean coast.
The abuses included abductions, extortion, sexual violence, killings, torture and religious persecution by people smugglers, traffickers, organized criminal gangs and armed groups.Women whom Amnesty International interviewed said rape was so commonplace along the smuggling routes that they took contraceptive pills before travelling.116 Refugees and migrants have reported that people-smugglers hold them captive to extort a ransom from their families.They are kept in deplorable and often squalid conditions, deprived of food and water and repeatedly beaten, harassed and insulted.Testimonies also reveal shocking abuses by the Libyan coastguard and at immigration detention centres in Libya.Refugees and migrants have described shootings and beatings while being picked up by the coastguard as well as further torture and other ill-treatment at detention centres. 29ny refugees are living in grinding poverty without access to basic services and without hope for the future, many are desperate to move elsewhere and some are willing to risk dangerous journeys to try and find a better life.On the first situation, we have already pointed out the thousands of drowning deaths in Mediterranean Sea; this phenomenon is not even exclusive (although it is especially lacerating, given the wealth of Europe compared to the countries of the world which host the largest number of refugees 30 ), the migration routes in Southeast Asia are, as Amnesty International points out, equally dangerous; on the Balkan route, refugees and migrants face arbitrary detention, ill-treatment by security forces, abuse, exploitation by smugglers, summary returns, including death.In Central America, thousands of people attempting to cross Mexico are kidnapped, raped or killed on one of the world's most dangerous journeys.During the journey they are exposed to abuse by officials of the migration services, police officers, military personnel, human traffickers and criminal gangs. 31though the weakening of asylum policies and social convictions around them must have been gradual, it has been in the last two years, as a result of the arrival of refugees from conflicts in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, but above all the terrible war in Syria, which is already remarkably visible the phenomenon we are paying attention to.Among the facts that demonstrate the hostility of the EU is the rise of far-right and racist/xenophobic parties; the pressure on the African border (Ceuta and Melilla) where a group of emigrants was shot by the spanish Guardia Civil; the replacement of the Mare Nostrum rescue operation by military border control devices ("Operation Sofía"), EU outsourcing policies which have led the African Union countries to restrict the arrival of refugees or bilateral treaties (Spain with Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal or Morocco, France with Mali, or Italy with Gaddafi's Libyan regime).
In the case of the Eritrean dictatorship, for example, about 50,000 young people have fled from the country to Europe or Israel, but to refer to a case already mentioned in the previous section (the torture that gives rise to the search for refuge).About 10,000 have disappeared along the way: a brutal network of people trafficking abducts refugees 29 AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, Tackling The Global Refugee Crisis: From Shirking To Sharing Responsibility, Report p. 24. 30When we break the global refugee crisis down by the numbers, the inequality in the response of states is stark.This is because the problem is not the number of refugees but that the vast majority (86% according to figures from UNHCR, the UN refugee agency) are hosted in low-and middle-income countries.Meanwhile, many of the world's wealthiest nations host the fewest and do the least.For example, the UK has accepted approximately 8,000 Syrians since 2011, while Jordan -with a population almost 10 times smaller than the UK and just 1.2% of its GDP -hosts over 656,000 Syrian refugees.The total refugee and asylumseeker population in Australia is 58,000 compared to 740,000 in Ethiopia.Such unequal sharing of responsibility is at the root of the global refugee crisis and the many problems faced by refugees.The Age of Human Rights Journal, 8 (June 2017) pp.49-66 ISSN: 2340-9592 DOI: 10.17561/tahrj.n8.3  in the Sinai Peninsula, where they are locked up and savagely tortured while Bedouin groups demand astronomical rescue of families.
Another crossroad between inhuman treatment and asylum seeking takes place around the lifting of fences32 .The words of a Kurdish Syrian from Kobani after the double wire fence in Hungary ("this is like Guantanamo", he said) graphically supports the label of this epigraph.Indeed, the deplorable images of hundreds of mostly refugee migrants crowded into the Hungarian countryside of Roszke, near the Serbian border, many of them with children, crying over the ground are a difficult argument.Human Rights Watch was one of the first organizations to denounce inhuman treatment before half a world could see the distribution of food thrown into bags through a fence similar to the way that human feeds the most dangerous animals in the zoo.
In addition, according to UNICEF data, in 2015 a quarter of all refugees who arrived in Europe, more than 100,000, were minors and about 10,000 crossed the border of their country alone.One year later, in 2016 and already according to Europol figures, about 10,000 children would have disappeared within the EU.These "disappearances" are not only another evidence of the failures in the community asylum system but also a disturbing fact in the confluence of the juridical goods that protect the two rights about we are writting now.The examples are very numerous, but we wanted to add a concrete one that illustrates the possibility of this section (inhuman and degrading treatment in response to attempts to apply for asylum on arrival).It is an example that has to do with a prophylactic conception of the political management of the refuge.On the one hand, the path followed by Australia that culminated in the so-called "Pacific Solution"; on the other hand, the answer of the EU, that is the pact with Turkey.In both cases it seems that "we" want to avoid direct contact with the refugees.We will leave the second scenario (the EU agreement with Turkey) for the third possibility of which we wrote in this work: torture after the search for refuge.
In the first case, Australia began by maintaining policies conforming to the standards of instruments relating to asylum and refugee rights.In 1976, for example, this country welcomed more than 124,000 refugees from the Vietnam War and a decade later did the same with more than 147,500 Lebanese when the civil war razed their country 33 .But the flow of refugees provoked a social rejection against the newcomers.A rejection that the political parties tried to take advantage of.In 1992, the Government had already decided to detain any person who arrived in Australia without a valid visa, including asylum seekers.A decade later, they launched the "Pacific Solution".This plan consisted of the diversion of ships with immigrants and refugees.The ships were forcibly taken to internment centers on the Manu and Nauru islands in Papua New Guinea.As Amnesty International denounced, Australia's "Operation Sovereign Borders" is the country's military-led border control operation.It began in late 2013 and involves a number of agencies which include the Australian Federal Police, Australian Defence Force, Australian Border Force and Department of Immigration and Border Protection.The mandate of Operation Sovereign Borders is to stop anyone -including asylum-seekers and refugees-from reaching Australia irregularly by boat.In operations that are called "pushbacks" or "turnbacks." 34ver before has a country signatory to the UN convention on refugees (both countries ratified it) completely closed the door to potential refugees 35 .Although this is a fact with clear analogies with the intentions of not a few governments around us, starting with ours, as an example of new paradigm 36 , Australia is the only country in the world that encloses irregular immigrants and refugees in detention centers outside its borders 37 .Since then there have been cases of suicide and many other cases of worsening of the physical and mental health of thousands of immigrants, including children and sick people.According to Amnesty International, by forcibly transferring refugees and people seeking asylum to Nauru, detaining them for prolonged periods in inhumane conditions, denying them appropriate medical care, and in other ways structuring its operations so that many experience a serious degradation of their mental health, the Australian government has violated the rights to be free from torture and other ill-treatment and from arbitrary detention, as well as other fundamental protections.
In recent years, Australian vessels have towed to people fleeing conflict zones or countries such as Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan.In many of these cases, when nongovernmental bodies agreed to the testimony of some of them, they found that they were fleeing precisely for having suffered torture, inhuman treatment or threats of torture.
There is no enough space here for an exhaustive development of the rest of the analogous cases neither.We will just mention something that affects our country: in its report of 2015, the Committee against Torture of the United Nations implicitly referred to what we call «devoluciones en caliente», and in general to the expulsion and extradition of persons "without prior assessment of the risk of return and impede access to procedures for determining refugee status".
The UN urged Spain to review immigration legislation "with a view to unconditionally respecting the right of non-refoulement" as reflected in the concluding observations on the sixth periodic report 38 .
The case of mistreatment and death caused by «concertinas» fits the possibility of inhuman or degrading treatment occurring in the context of the search for refuge (or arriving there); Amnesty International Report 2002 "Spain: Identity Crisis: Torture and Racist Abuse by State Agents" collected more than 300 different cases of immigrants who had undergone these practices at border posts, reception centers, police stations or in the streets. 39.The Temporary Immigrant Shelter Centers (CETI) of Ceuta and Melilla, public administration establishments, are still very illustrative examples of the dangerous path of something theorically conceived as first-time reception devices intended to provide basic social services and benefits to immigrants and asylum seekers identification and medical check-ups are carried out. 40): the 2015 report expressed concern about the high levels of overcrowding and the deplorable material conditions of its facilities.These were described as a threat to the health and the physical and psychological integrity of the people there.

V. TORTURE OR INHUMAN TREATMENT AFTER SEEKING ASYLUM
There is also a third case: the possibility (an actual perversion of the asylum system) that an asylum seeker ends up in a country where he is at risk of being tortured or suffer cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment… again.This risk has great relevance due to the number of people (including children) wandering unprotected along Europe (or in countries in transit and international waters).We will concentrate in some of the consequences of the agreement between the EU and Turkey that entered into force on 38 It was also criticized the "excessive use of force" by the Police and Civil Guard in border controls and demonstrations.Attitudes that, according to this UN agency, remain unpunished for lack of prevention measures and mechanisms to be supervised.The report recalls that some agents who have made disproportionate use of their force even became pardoned.The UN considered in that report that the crime of torture, as contained in the Criminal Code, is poorly developed and the penalties "are still not adequate considering their seriousness."Spain is requested to amend the articles in order to bring it into line with that of the International Convention against Torture.http://www.europapress.es/sociedad/noticiaonu-insta-espana-revisar-legislacion-inmigracion-asilo-20150515180958.html 18th september 2016 39 ZÚÑIGA LÓPEZ, L., «Instrumentos jurídicos para prevenir la tortura y los tratos inhumanos y degradantes» in ARARTEKO, La prevención y erradicación de la tortura y los malos tratos en los sistemas democráticos, Colección «Jornadas sobre derechos humanos» nº 7, 2004, p. 137. 40 On the legal regulation of these centers: articles 264-266 Reglamento de la Ley Orgánica 4/2000, aprobado por Real Decreto 557/2011, 20th April.
The Age of Human Rights Journal, 8 (June 2017) pp.49-66 ISSN: 2340-9592 DOI: 10.17561/tahrj.n8.3  20th March 2016 and which authorized the return of asylum seekers to Turkey under the assumption that it is a safe country for refugees.
According to Human Rights Watch, the first round of deportations authorized by the EU from the Greek island of Chios to Turkey in April 2016 was hasty and chaotic and violated the rights of the deportees.Moreover, the Turkish authorities have not allowed visits by human rights groups or UN agencies once there.
The EU and Greece, in this kind of "race" to find a populist solution outside the legal mechanisms already foreseen for the cases of asylum and refuge (those we underlined in the first section) ignored the basic rights of all people, including those who wanted to apply for asylum.These are evictions that highlight the fundamental problems of large-scale EU-wide accelerated returns to an unsafe country.The authorities did not inform them that they would be deported, nor where they would be taken, and some people were not allowed to take personal belongings.
In addition, and according to UNHCR, thirteen of the deportees of Chios had expressed their desire to apply for asylum in Greece.The Greek authorities precipitated the forced returns from Chios and Lesbos, in order to meet a deadline announced for the commencement of the deportations.According to Europe´s Gatekeeper 41 , a quite recent Amnesty International report, the EU is in danger of becoming complicit in another serious violation of human rights against refugees and asylum seekers due to Turkish pressure on applicants to return to Iraq or Syria as well as police arrests and collective deportations forced into war zones.
Finally, Human Rights Watch has denounced another side effect of the EU-Turkey agreement: after its entry into force, cases of Syrian refugees returned from the Turkish borders to Syria have been documented after being brutally beaten, some of them to death. 42

VI. SYNTHESIS AND RECAPITULATION
Firstly, we linked the raison d'être of human rights of asylum and the right of not suffering torture, inhuman and degrading treatment with its common nature but also with its current global crisis situation, both are not two simple rights but, installed in the same nucleus of human rights declarations and covenants, they exemplified very well the spirit that accompanied the first phase of the history of human rights.The beginning of the second half of the twentieth century was an era characterized by the widest reflection and consensus.However, today, in the first decades of the 21st century, it is possible to see that, precisely because of a context of the opposite nature, a pattern of exception, urgency and fear -terrorist attacks and massive refugee flows-is quite irresponsible and full of nuances, the fate of both rights is again, unfortunately, similar.Both rights limit the powers that governments can justly exercise over the human beings under their power (torture) or in their territories (asylum), and these limits include an absolute ban on subjecting individuals to forms of pain that strip them of their dignity, identity and even sanity.However, the end of the seriousness conception with which the obligations and implications of the legally binding force of both rights were assumed paralleled a worrying retreat in the socio-political perception of the demands stemming from the "hard core" of human rights catalogs.We argued here for the unconditional refutation of any attempt to justify torture, without exceptions.The extension of instrumental torture as a fundamental part of the "war on terror" is becoming, in the words of Massimo La Torre, a veritable "legal nightmare."Similarly, the "refugee crisis" is -and here we come to the expression of Javier de Lucas-a "political emptiness" of the EU.It is not the only case, the "Pacific Solution" in Australia, as well as some background of the referendum on the exit of the EU (so called "Brexit") by the UK, the fences against the immigrants of the Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and the sinister referendum to reject the quotas refugees imposed by the EU, or the rise of extreme right-wing parties to the fears of European citizens (from Austria to Finland) for the arrival of refugees, make clear the new paradigm: the abandonment of the basic legal obligations of the right of asylum.
Secondly, we wanted to draw a picture of the (very current) state of a triple zone of intersection between the right not to suffer torture or inhuman or degrading treatment and the rights of asylum and refuge: a) torture as the cause of the search of refuge; b) torture and/or inhuman and degrading treatment in the search for shelter; c) torture and/or inhuman or degrading treatment after the search for shelter.
With regard to the first question, the seriousness of the crimes against the Syrian population, the extent of torture in Eritrea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and other refugee origins continues to explain the arrival of potential asylum seekers to the EU (and many other countries).At the same time, if the real danger of torture or escape from it is today one of the most worrying causes of the ungrateful, dangerous and obstacle-free refugees seeking asylum in Europe, another scandal dereives from the most basic abuses and violations of human rights in this quest for refuge, from torture itself: from the terrible case of Eritrean refugees on their journey through Africa to the thousands of dead people in the Mediterranean Sea.Finally, the agreement between the EU and Turkey which entered into force in March 2016 authorizing the return of asylum-seekers to Turkey under the assumption that it is a safe country illustrates the possibility that violations of rights at the end of the refugee journey.
We mentioned in the title ot his work the image of a paved road in two directions, a nod to the famous film of Monte Hellman, but regarding with cinametophrapic images, we would particularly like to finish with the recent film by Anton Corbijn based on John Le Carre's novel The Most Wanted Man (2014) as it perfectly illustrates the devilish two-way road in this article´s tittle: at the beginning of this film, a young Chechen with aspect of having been brutally tortured leaves naked of a dark sewer of Hamburg.His past is a past of torture in Russian prisons, his present is the deseperate seek for refuge and peace through strong pacifist convictions expressed in his Muslim faith, his future will be become him just in an object coveted by his "informative value" by the new intelligence agencies that are permanently removed from the principles and values (if any) of the old spies of that distant time full of contradictions, but a time as well, when it was possible to achieve that normative code of universal validity that we called human rights covenants.