Increasingly, torture came to be seen as uncivilised and unacceptable. The French Revolution outlawed it in France and the Napoleonic armies carried abolition to much of the rest of Europe. The last European jurisdictions to abolish legal torture were Portugal (1828) and the canton of Glarus in Switzerland (1851). But of course torture did not come to an end, it simply went underground.

Today, modern sensibilities, shaped by the reaction to the crimes against humanity committed by the Axis Powers in the Second World War, have led to a sweeping international rejection of most aspects of torture. Torture is declared to be unacceptable by Article 5 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its prohibition was ratified by 145 states, including the US and UK.

Yet in many countries such commitments are more honoured in the breach than the observance. According to recent reports by Amnesty International and the US State Department, more than 100 of these nations have failed to fully eradicate the practice. In April 2009, for example, Amnesty International revealed that allegations of beatings, racial abuse, excessive force and even unlawful killings by French police are rarely investigated effectively and those responsible are seldom brought to justice.

The debate over the use of torture revived following 9/11, when the Bush administration began using "torture-lite" techniques against suspected terrorist detainees. These have included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, long-term use of loud noises, forced nudity, and forced standing. The use of such techniques at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, and the practice of "extraordinary rendition", by which US and British intelligence agencies are accused of complicity in sending terror suspects for interrogation to countries where there is no legal protection against torture, have sparked fierce controversy.