Denailing
method of torture
Denailing is the extraction of the nails from the fingers and/or toes, either as an accident, a medical procedure to treat severe nail infections, or as a method of torture.
Health consequences
Removed nails are capable of growing back normally over several months if the nail matrix is left intact through surgical extraction. However, if the matrix is damaged by trauma, it can result in an overgrowth of tissue from the proximal nail fold, resulting in the formation of pterygium. Particularly, if the nail matrix is burnt by a heated instrument, subsequent growth may produce nails which are striped, thin, or broken into longitudinal segments.
History of use as torture
The United Nations Istanbul Protocol describes nail removal and the insertion of sharp objects such as wires and glass shards under the nail as forms of torture. Nails were historically torn out with a variety of iron devices, some applied red-hot, while modern torturers prefer a deliberate, precise extraction by surgical scalpel.
In the aftermath of Italy's republican referendum after World War II, efforts to prosecute former officials in the Fascist government for collaborationism and war crimes resulted in the legal differentiation between the concepts of normal brutality, cruel brutality, and particularly cruel brutality. Only in the case of particularly cruel brutality would the accused be rejected for amnesty. Denailing was generally considered to fall under the first two categories, as for a brutality to be considered particularly cruel, it had to "horrify even those who are familiar with torture."
Modern use
Venezuela
Venezuelan activist Ángela Expósito has been subject to denailing while in detention, starting in 2018, among other torture methods. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela documented that senior lieutenant Franklin Caldera, detained on 2019 during the Nicolás Maduro administration, was subjected to several methods of torture, including cutting and insertion of needles under his fingernails.
“Denailing” enters the record as method of torture. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Denailing, method and torture can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5256564. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Denailing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.