Far too often my colleagues and I have had to act as the notaries of other people’s suffering’, lamented the late Antonio Cassese.1 Implicit in this passage are uneasy questions of utility: how much does what we do work? Can penning down pain be an act of prevention? In his book Inhuman States, Cassese pendulously struck notes of despondence and defiance in spinning together professional and personal reflections on the early days of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), of which he was inaugural president. Cassese, in so writing, dismissed belief in international law as the singlehanded saviour of the downtrodden detainee, gesturing instead to the ‘compromised circumstances’2 under which he worked.

Highly regarded in the anti-torture field, Malcolm Evans has occupied a similar position to that of Cassese. Until recently, he was the long-serving chair of the UN Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture (SPT), the UN equivalent to the CPT (to put it reductively). No longer constrained by the position, Tackling Torture is Evans’ attempt to call it as he saw it. Wary of gratuitously recounting a ‘litany of horrors’, Evans’ book is anchored in the same rare genre as that of Cassese. His too is a skilful weaving of uncomfortable truths, embarrassments, disappointments, regrets, winces, messiness, anecdotes, and qualms serving to depict the ‘compromised circumstances’ inherent in prevention in practice. Beyond aiming to provide a realistic depiction of what the prevention paradigm looks like, Evans ventures to discuss to what extent and under what conditions prevention helps counter the ‘broken systems breaking people’ (one of his numerous cutting turns of phrase).