Dr Anton Symkovych elected to the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture

University of Melbourne criminologist Dr Anton Symkovych has been elected to the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (SPT), the UN body responsible for preventing torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in places of detention.

Dr Symkovych was elected at the 11th Meeting of States Parties to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture, held in Geneva on 1 October 2026. He was elected in the first round of voting, receiving 60 votes. The election was highly competitive, with 22 candidates from 21 countries competing for 13 vacant positions.

“I’m very grateful for the confidence placed in me and conscious of the responsibility that comes with it,” Dr Symkovych noted.

The SPT is one of the United Nations’ key preventive human rights bodies. Its mandate includes conducting visits to places where people are deprived of their liberty, strengthening National Preventive Mechanisms, and working with governments and other stakeholders to identify and minimise risks of torture and ill-treatment before they occur. Unlike many international monitoring mechanisms, the SPT has a mandate that allows its independent experts to visit places of detention directly and hold confidential discussions with detainees. Its work encompasses a wide range of settings, including prisons, police detention facilities, immigration detention centres, psychiatric institutions, and other places where people are deprived of their liberty.

Dr Symkovych is an internationally recognised researcher of prisons, detention, and carceral governance, with more than two decades of ethnographic research in custodial settings across the Global North, South, and East. His fieldwork has included men’s and women’s prisons in England, South Africa, and Ukraine, as well as juvenile justice institutions in the United States. His work combines extensive fieldwork with engagement with prison practitioners and criminal justice policymakers. He has spent hundreds of hours speaking with people deprived of liberty, prison staff, families, and criminal justice professionals, alongside extended periods observing everyday institutional life in custodial settings.

In addition to his academic research and policy consultancy, Dr Symkovych has previous professional experience in juvenile justice and social work, including working with young people in detention and on parole. His appointment brings this field-based expertise to the SPT’s international work on preventing torture and ill-treatment and strengthening safeguards for people deprived of their liberty.

Dr Symkovych’s four-year term on the Subcommittee begins in January 2027.