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By Alice Jill Edwards
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On November 25, the United Nations marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The date will bring statements of solidarity with survivors of sexual violence everywhere. How much those words mean depends on a harder question: Are the institutions that issue them prepared to treat every survivor's account by the same standard?
Over a 30-year career, most recently as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2022 to 2026, I have met many survivors of torture, including sexual attacks, from Israel and Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan and Bosnia. Most faced the same uncertainty: Will I be believed? Will what happened to me be recognized for what it was? Today, in an increasingly politicized world, they also ask: Will my story be investigated fairly, or at all? Will it ever lead to justice?
Increasingly, the answer depends on who the victim is and who stands accused. U.N. bodies, investigators and journalists are applying uneven standards to allegations of torture and other atrocities. Some claims are accepted readily, others face relentless doubt, and some are never investigated at all. That selectivity harms more than individual survivors. It weakens the evidence that justice depends on, and it lets perpetrators dismiss credible findings as partisan. If accountability is to mean anything, every allegation, whichever side it implicates, must be held to the same rigorous and transparent standard.
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Nowhere is the double standard sharper than in the war between Israel and Hamas. Why do some people who demand immediate recognition of Palestinian suffering hesitate to acknowledge the violence committed on October 7, 2023, or the responsibility of Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians? Why do others accept that civilians were murdered and taken hostage that day, yet resist recognizing that sexual crimes were committed in the same places, during the same violence? And why do some who rightly insist on that recognition turn away from the accounts of torture told by Palestinians held in Israeli detention?
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The facts of that war are grave on every side. On October 7, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups killed some 1,200 people in Israel, committed rape and other sexual violence alongside other atrocities, and took 251 people hostage, one-third of whom never came home alive. Palestinians in Gaza have since borne the dire consequences of Hamas' actions and of Israel's military response: tens of thousands killed and injured, mass displacement and homes and buildings destroyed across the Strip.
The law leaves no room for such selectivity. The prohibition of torture is absolute: no superior order, amnesty or immunity can justify it, and there is no time limit on prosecuting it. It applies regardless of who the victims or perpetrators are, and investigations must be independent, impartial, prompt and effective. Crimes committed by one party to a conflict do not erase crimes committed by another. All must be documented, and accountability pursued.
In policing, there is a concept known as “tunnel vision”: investigators favor evidence that supports an early theory and dismiss what contradicts it, while assumptions about who the victim or suspect is shape whose testimony is believed. Institutional and political pressure, including from U.N. member states aligned with one another, can reinforce a single narrative and chill dissenting views.
Double standards damage the evidence on which justice depends. They affect whose accounts are collected, which allegations are investigated and whose suffering enters the public record. Human rights work loses credibility when an allegation is judged plausible or implausible according to who is accused. Politicized investigations are easily dismissed by perpetrators as partial and false, even when credible evidence exists, and U.N. investigators who blur the line between investigation and activism hand them that excuse. For survivors, as many have told me, not being believed is a second injury.
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As U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, I found myself in a small minority of human rights experts willing to investigate and speak up about the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups and by Israel.
A U.N. mission led by Pramila Patten, with a qualified team of forensic and digital experts, found reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, occurred during the October 7 attacks in multiple locations. It also found clear and convincing information of sexual violence against hostages. I had reviewed similar evidence and reached the same conclusions months before Patten's report, in a communication to Hamas and the Permanent Mission of Palestine in Geneva. Yet our assessments have been continuously queried and questioned by human rights experts and public figures. Even with extensive video, photographic and forensic evidence and interviews, the findings met intense dismissal.
The same standard must apply to allegations against Israel. On November 1, the Arab League called for an independent international investigation into allegations, reported by a Palestinian prisoners' media office, that detainees from Gaza held in the Rakefet wing of Israel's Ramla Prison have been repeatedly beaten, leaving some injured and burned. My own inquiries into allegations of torture and mistreatment at another facility, Sde Teiman, in May 2024 saw the Israeli Supreme Court order the supervision of that facility and the transfer of Palestinian detainees to other locations.
All such allegations should be investigated independently, and to exactly the same standard of proof that was demanded of the U.N. team that examined October 7. Not a lower standard because the alleged victims are Palestinian, and not a higher one because the accused is a state.
This is not to equivocate between different crimes. It is to follow the truth no matter where it leads. On my fact-finding mission to Ukraine in September 2023, I interviewed both Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war, despite Russia's refusal to cooperate with my mandate.
The U.N.'s human rights mission in Ukraine has documented 1,000 cases of sexual torture, mostly against male detainees. It attributed 89 percent to Russia's forces and 11 percent to Ukraine's. In my own investigations as Special Rapporteur, I reviewed more than 80 credible cases of sexual torture by Russian forces. Equal standards do not mean equal blame: the evidence sets the proportions, not the politics.
The principle that survivors have taught me is simple: they do not exist to provide testimony for institutions. Institutions exist to secure survivors' rights.
It is impossible to promise every survivor a particular legal outcome. But they have a right to demand a serious and impartial response, and to know that neither their identity nor that of the perpetrator will determine whether anyone investigates. This November 25, that principle should apply equally to the Israeli and other women and hostages attacked on October 7 and to Palestinians held in Israeli detention. No durable peace can be built by asking some survivors to disappear from the record.
Alice Jill Edwards is an international lawyer and was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2022 to 2026.
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