Concordance
“torture” in the General Debate
735 uses across 71 years of statements. First recorded in 1952; used most in 1976, when it appeared 33 times across 20 statements by 20 speakers.
What this counts, and what it does not. This is
the number of times the string torture appears in the
text of General Debate statements, matched on word boundaries and ignoring
case. It is a fact about a word. It is not a measure of how much any
state cared about the subject, what position it took, or whether it meant it
— and nothing on this page should be read that way.
The final year of this series is machine-transcribed from the official simultaneous interpretation rather than taken from a UN transcript, so it counts what a transcriber heard. See session 80.
Used most by
| Speaker | Uses | Statements | First | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kingdom of Denmark | 31 | 18 | 1973 | 2018 |
| Kingdom of the Netherlands | 28 | 19 | 1956 | 2022 |
| Austria | 24 | 19 | 1963 | 2024 |
| Sweden | 21 | 14 | 1973 | 2002 |
| Ireland | 18 | 9 | 1974 | 1994 |
| Germany | 18 | 14 | 1981 | 2022 |
| United States | 18 | 14 | 1974 | 2025 |
| Cuba | 18 | 15 | 1964 | 2017 |
| Yemen | 17 | 13 | 1960 | 2021 |
| Pakistan | 16 | 11 | 1971 | 2022 |
| Libya | 16 | 11 | 1957 | 2018 |
| Cambodia | 15 | 3 | 1961 | 1985 |
| Costa Rica | 14 | 10 | 1976 | 2024 |
| Greece | 13 | 8 | 1977 | 1988 |
| Luxembourg | 11 | 6 | 1974 | 2013 |
| Norway | 11 | 9 | 1974 | 2007 |
| Venezuela | 10 | 9 | 1976 | 2021 |
| Belgium | 10 | 8 | 1974 | 2022 |
| Sudan | 10 | 7 | 1963 | 2025 |
| Kuwait | 9 | 5 | 1971 | 2010 |
| Syria | 8 | 6 | 1954 | 2025 |
| Iceland | 8 | 5 | 1977 | 2006 |
| India | 8 | 4 | 1953 | 1979 |
| Tunisia | 8 | 6 | 1977 | 1991 |
| Spain | 8 | 6 | 1983 | 2004 |
A state that speaks every year has more chances to use a word than one admitted in 2011, and a state whose statements are longer has more again. These are counts, not rates.