>'Punishable by torture' is ridiculous. Caning is rarely used,
By any definition, caning is torture. There's no potential ambiguity, unlike waterboarding. Singapore no longer publishes caning data, but illegal immigration carries a mandatory sentence of caning and more than 10,000 people were arrested for that in 2004.
Edit: there is a torture exemption for pain and suffering arising from "lawful sanctions": perhaps caning is excluded from the definition of torture. I guess judicial waterboarding would also be legal. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
Well, yes. It's a very nice place to live, and part of the reason for that is how selective they are about who gets to stay there. So I can sympathize with the idea of really cracking down on illegals.
Anyway, compare it to prison: caning probably hurts a whole lot, and might take weeks to heal. And then it's over. Prison hurts less, but takes years -- during which the prisoner is subsidized by the taxpayers. If the US introduced caning as a prison alternative (for first-time offenders, at least) it would probably make the country a much nicer place to live.
By any definition, caning is torture. There's no potential ambiguity, unlike waterboarding. Singapore no longer publishes caning data, but illegal immigration carries a mandatory sentence of caning and more than 10,000 people were arrested for that in 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
Edit: there is a torture exemption for pain and suffering arising from "lawful sanctions": perhaps caning is excluded from the definition of torture. I guess judicial waterboarding would also be legal. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm