The European Commission is trying to restrict the transfer of torture technology. But regulations will be meaningless if non-member states don't support the action. Steve Wright reports

The European Commission has published a draft regulation to ban member states trading in "equipment and products which could be used for capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".

Europe's brutal history is recorded in torture museums in places such as Nuremberg, Amsterdam and the London Dungeon. But torture instruments? Still? Most people assume that torture technologies remain medieval museum fodder. Sadly not.

According to Amnesty International, prisoners are tortured and ill-treated in 130 countries, with widespread and persistent human rights violations in 70. The craft of the torturer has moved on since the days of the Spanish Inquisition. While still violent and crude for the most part, science is providing a more efficient tool box.

Standard operating procedures based on sensory deprivation techniques pioneered by the British Army in Northern Ireland have created "stress & duress" techniques. Such procedures are being used to process the Al Qaida suspects in Guantanamo Bay.

Pulsed 50,000 volt electroshock devices that interfere with muscle skeletal control, have become the universal tool of the torturer. EU efforts to control the proliferation of such technologies only came about because non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty vigorously lobbied governments to stop the torture trade.

The catalyst was a Channel 4 programme in 1995, which revealed a British sponsored torture trail. Senior staff from BAe-owned Royal Ordnance were shown offering electroshock batons for sale and admitting they had sold 8,000 to Saudi Arabia. Frank Stott, a director of Scottish firm ICL Technical Plastics, also admitted that he'd sold thousands to Chinese authorities, "who had copied them".

The European Parliament called on the commission to incorporate these technologies within the scope of arms export controls and ensure greater transparency. In a June 2000 report to the European Parliament's STOA (scientific and technological options assessment) Committee, the UK Omega Foundation formally requested that the European Union should (i) introduce "severe restrictions on the creation, deployment, use and export of weapons which cause inhumane treatment, superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering;" and (ii) stop the dubious practice of issu ing CE quality kite markings on foreign electroshock weapons.

The new EC regulation was informed by an expert briefing in October between Amnesty International, European Commission officers, the Omega Foundation, police and medical experts and the UN special rapporteur on torture. Participants were told of 230 known manufacturers, distributors, suppliers or brokers of electroshock weapons and 69 of leg irons, shackles or thumb-cuffs. The US has the largest number of companies providing restraint technology (43), followed by Western Europe (10); similarly, the US has 81 companies providing electroshock equipment, followed by Asia Pacific (56), Western Europe (41); and Eastern-Central Europe (23). Africa, Latin America and the Middle East have 11, 8 and 10 respectively. Thus, the West has the largest share of companies involved in providing restraint technology and the proliferation of electroshock weapons.

When the measure is formally adopted in spring, it will ban equipment that has virtually no use other than in capital punishment, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The export of technologies such as gallows, guillotines, electric chairs, gas chambers, lethal automatic drug injection systems, electric shock belts, leg irons and individual shackles exceeding 190mm will be outlawed.

The last measure is important, since British companies who supplied medieval ironmongery to the slave trade continue to manufacture. As recently as December, journalists reported that they had bought British leg irons in America. Although the export of leg shackles has been outlawed since 1997, the UK government granted six licences for equipment within this category in 2001.

For the first time, this EC regulation would ban all such trade. A second class of equipment, which includes portable electroshock devices, restraint chairs and shackleboards, and certain riot control devices using chemical irritants will require authorisation by an EU committee.

Since such equipment has been used in human rights abuses and torture, authorisation would probably not be allowed if there are reports of human rights violations in the receiving country. An annual report will be made to the commission, but it is unclear whether this will be made public.

It should be, if people are to believe in the transparency of the process. Once formally approved, this regulation is revolutionary in its scope, since it provides for scrutiny by an EU committee - a measure of accountability way beyond what is being given to the UK parliament in regard to its proposed arms export regulations.

The special rapporteur on torture will present to the UN measures to take this initiative worldwide. Could this mean the end of torture technologies as we know them? Possibly. It is more likely that technological innovation will spawn new tools designed to get around controls. The EC regulators have warned of the need to take technological developments into account.

"Particular attention will have to be given to law enforcement equipment that is presented as 'non-lethal' which could be more harmful than claimed by its manufacturer and therefore lend itself to abuse for the purpose of torture."

Indeed, such new technologies enable systematic human rights abuse to be more automated, so that one operator can induce pain and paralysis on a mass scale. This happened in the Moscow theatre siege, with the fatal use of the immobilising drug fentanyl. Similar less lethal chemicals have been reported to be in preparation in case of a war in Iraq.

Symposia in Virginia, US, and Germany will be discussing microwave weapons that can heat humans to unbearable temperatures or head them off at borders with a wireless or plasma taser - a device that paralyses muscles through painful electric shock.

In the Alice in Wonderland of definitions, no one admits to making torture technology or using it: ergo it no longer exists. EC policymakers are aware their efforts can be scuppered by the security industry. The new EC regulations can make a welcomedifference, but only if the UN can persuade countries such as America, Taiwan, South Africa and China to follow suit rather than undermine this important step to civilising the security trade.

· Dr Steve Wright is a visiting fellow in the School of Information Management at Leeds Metropolitan University