Condemnation of the Lawlessness and Violation of Justice of the US and Britain:
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Lord Steyn and the Rule of Law |
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Lord Steyn is one of Britain's most senior judges. In his interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News he vehemently condemns the widespread lawlessness of the US and Britain and intimates that in his view both administrations could well be guilty of war crimes on the basis of international law established after the defeat of fascism in World War Two. In 2003, and since, he has condemned the US's Guantánamo Bay prison camp, calling the imprisonment of "terrorist suspects" there a "monstrous failure of justice" that constitutes "utter lawlessness". This was reported at the time as breaking with the convention that law lords do not speak out on politically sensitive issues. Lord Steyn's stand has been that judges "have the duty, in times of crisis, to guard against an unprincipled and exorbitant" government response. [For the full text of Lord Steyn's November 2003 speech, Guantánamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole ] In October this year, Lord Steyn in an interview on Panorama , condemned the government's plans to detain "terrorist suspects" for up to 90 days as incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. "Experience shows that governments frequently ask for more powers than they need, and when they get those powers they abuse them from time to time," he said. Early, before the July 7 bombings, he had accused the British and US governments of whipping up public fear of terrorism, and of being determined "to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures". Lord Steyn has condemned military action in Iraq, saying the government had been "driven to scrape the bottom of the legal barrel" to find justification in law for it. He added, "After the dreadful bombings in London, we were asked to believe that the Iraq war did not make London and the world a more dangerous place. Surely, on top of everything else, we do not have to listen to a fairy tale." Furthermore, Lord Steyn has referred to the huge wave of legislation on criminal justice (since Labour came to power there have been 12 criminal justice acts) in these terms: "Year after year, half-baked ideas are adopted in haste, puffed up to be the ideal solution and routinely abandoned a year later. The quality of much of the legislation has been described by text-book writers as scandalous. So, to the bewilderment of the public and judges, the position in regard to criminal justice continues from year to year. It is a little unfair to blame it on the judges, as politicians so frequently do." Lord Steyn has remarked that it was wrong for the Prime Minister to have called the rule of law a "game". He said, "The maintenance of the rule of law is not a game. It is about access to justice, fundamental human rights and democratic values." He continued, "One knows, of course, that the Government earnestly desires a closure on this issue [Iraq]. But that is not possible: while there are different views on this occasion, even Mr Walter Wolfgang would be free to express the opinion for which he was charged under the Terrorism Act. Possibly his name will live on when the names of some now in charge of affairs are forgotten." In November last year, Lord Steyn in a lecture said that it was the "democratic and constitutional duty of judges to stand up where necessary for individuals against the Government". "If the judges of today teach a new generation of lawyers, and judges, that complaisance by the judiciary to the views of the legislature and the executive in policy areas is the best way forward, one of the pillars of our democracy will have been weakened. In troubled times there is an ever present danger of the seductive but misconceived judicial mindset that 'after all, we are on the same side as the Government'." He said, "The detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has one single object: the United States administration wanted to place them beyond the protection of the rule of law. They created a hellhole of utter lawlessness where the prisoners are at the mercy of the American army, of which the President is, in law and in fact, the Commander in Chief.'' Lord Steyn was forced to step down last year from the panel of judges hearing the challenge to the lawfulness of detention without trial for foreign terrorist suspects after the government took exception to earlier remarks he had made on the subject. Last December the law lords ruled by 8-1 that the detention without trial of foreign nationals in Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons and the Broadmoor high security hospital breached human rights laws. He was giving the keynote address to an audience of judges and lawyers at the annual meeting in central London of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, whose chairman is Lord Bingham, the senior law lord. His remarks in June came after a report from the Council of Europe's committee for the prevention of torture, which concluded that the treatment of some detainees "could be considered as amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment". [For the full text of this address, click Laying the Foundations of human rights Law in the United Kingdom .] The session was chaired by the appeal court judge Dame Mary Arden. The audience included Lord Brown, another law lord, Judge Luzius Wildhaber, president of the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, Sir Franklin Berman QC, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned over the attorney general's advice that the Iraq war was legal. Lord Steyn said of the Belmarsh ruling: "Nobody doubts in any way the very real risk of international terrorism. But the Belmarsh decision came against the public fear whipped up by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom since September 11 2001 and their determination to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures." As far as he could ascertain, he said, the Belmarsh case was the first in which a government had sought, and managed, to change the composition of the panel of law lords due to hear a particular case. The government, represented by the attorney general, argued that Lord Steyn should not sit on the case because, in a 2002 lecture, he had said: "In my view the suspension of article 5 of the European convention on human rights – which prevents arbitrary detention – so that people can be locked up without trial when there is no evidence on which they could be prosecuted is not in present circumstances justified." It was "a matter of speculation", Lord Steyn has said, whether the challenge to his right to sit on the panel for the Belmarsh case had been motivated by his 2003 lecture. It is important to remember that the judgments of the Nuremberg Tribunals and international law such as the UN Charter on Human Rights embodied the principles arising out of the defeat of nazi fascism and the utter lawlessness of the Hitlerites and exclusion from society and human rights to the point of genocide of "inferior" human beings. They were the legal embodiment of the defeat of the negation of everything human that fascism represented. It is in this context also that the government's frustration with such judgment's as that in the Belmarsh case must be seen, a frustration represented by Tony Blair's outburst that legality must take account of the fact that "the rules of the game are changing". This outburst not only referred to the "war on terror" but to the so-called "new" types of crime such as "anti-social behaviour", which Tony Blair alleges cannot be tackled by the "rules of the game we have at the moment". In other words, there is no doubt that the government is seeking to impose an outrageous retrogression in the sphere of justice, as in other spheres, and the stand of Lord Steyn and other judges has been in response to this retrogression. Lord Steyn was educated at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (BA law 1957, LLB Law 1957) and University College, Oxford (MA Law 1957). He commenced practice at the South African Bar in 1958 and was called to the English Bar in 1973, becoming Queens Counsel in 1979. Lord Steyn was a Judge of the High Court, Queen's Bench Division from 1985-91, a member of the Supreme Court Rule Committee from 1985-89 and presiding Judge of the Northern Circuit from 1989-91. He was Lord Justice of Appeal from 1992-95 and a Law Lord from 1995-2005. On retiring in September as a Law Lord, he was appointed as the new chairman of Justice, the other civil rights group. Other distinguished posts held by Lord Steyn include Chair of the Race Relations Committee of the Bar (1987-88) and President of the British Insurers Law Association from 1992-94. War Crimes and Lawlessness on a Truly Grand ScaleFull transcript of Jon Snow's interview with law lord, Lord Steyn, December 6, 2005, Channel 4
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