From Norm Violations to Norm Development: Deviance, International Institutions, and the Torture Prohibition.

This article examines how violations of international norms contribute to the development and clarification of those norms, focusing on the prohibition of torture. It argues that international institutions—such as courts, ad hoc tribunals, commissions of inquiry, and expert committees—play a central role in determining what constitutes deviant behavior and in shaping both formal and informal lawmaking. Through comparative case studies of the European human rights institutions' rulings on Greece and the United Kingdom in the 1960s–70s and the United Nations Committee against Torture's (CmAT) reviews of Israeli and U.S. interrogation practices in the 1990s–2000s, the article shows how institutional norm applications influenced the definition and enforcement of the torture prohibition, including the drafting of the 1984 UN Convention against Torture (CAT) and CmAT's General Comment No. 2. The findings highlight that norm violations, mediated by institutional fact-finding and interpretation, drive norm development even amid contestation by powerful states.