The Importance of Adhering to International Laws

On the same day that US authorities voluntarily release 2,600 pages of paperwork, concerning the 490 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and reveal that only 10 of them have ever been charged with any crime; UK Defence secretary John Reid has demanded sweeping changes to international law which he feels hinders the fight against terrorism.

Mr Reid declined to say whether he had come round to the US view that detainees at Guantánamo bay should not be allowed the protection of the conventions or the courts. Similarly, he would not say if he thought Britain should support the US practice of extraordinary rendition, the transferring of prisoners to secret camps where they risk being tortured. However, he said, it was not "sufficient just to say [Guantánamo] is wrong". "We are finding an enemy which obeys no rules whatsoever", he said, referring to what he called "barbaric terrorism".

The conventions, he said, were created more than half century ago "when the world was almost unrecognisable". They dealt with how the sick and injured and how prisoners of war were treated, "and the obligations on states during their military occupation of another state", he said.

The conventions of which Mr. Reid speaks were, indeed, formed when the world was "unrecognisable" from today. They were formed in 1948 as the world's reaction to the barbarity of the Nazis. They were formed as a reaction to the horrendous slaughter of over six million Jews in gas chambers in Nazi Concentration Camps. They were formed as the world's way of saying, "Never again".

If Mr. Reid is seriously arguing that al Qaeda represent a greater threat to world order than Hitler's Germany did, then he is being delusional.

This same international law that the UK and US now appear to find "quaint" and "tiresome" is the bedrock of international order and has served the world well for over half a century.

To Reid, that is the problem.

"The laws of the 20th century placed constraints on us all which enhanced peace and protected liberty," he said. "We must ask ourselves whether, as the new century begins, they will do the same."

He said the existing legal framework had been drawn up at a time when the main international threat came from conflict between states. However the world was now facing a threat from terrorist groups unconstrained by any sense of morality or adherence to convention, and which were known to be seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

He goes on:

In particular, Mr Reid said the spread of weapons of mass destruction posed new questions about when it was right to mount a pre-emptive strike against another country to prevent an attack.

"We know that terrorist groups continue to try to acquire such weapons and that they have described their willingness to use them," he said.

"Hopefully, we would learn of any such threat before any atrocities had been committed. I believe we would have strong legal grounds to take action to protect ourselves against attack. I also suspect that others would disagree."

Of course, this is errant nonsense. It's right up there with Blair calling for the renegotiation of the Treaty of Westphalia.

The inherent right for a country to protect itself from "imminent" attack is already enshrined in international law, and has been since 1837 and the Caroline incident. There are many international lawyers who will argue that article 51 did not supersede Caroline.

The problem that Reid, and the US and UK governments face, is not that international law is insufficient to enable them to properly fight their terrorist enemy. It is, rather, that they have undermined international law by invading Iraq without proving the "imminence" of threat demanded by the Caroline incident, that would have given them legitimacy.

I also note that when Reid bemoans the constraints of international law, that he prefers to deal in generalities, rather than to name any specific law that he would change.

The answer for all of us surely, facing a terrorist threat, is not to rip up the rule book that has served us so well for sixty years. It is this rule book that defines our humanity. I say that we should stick rigidly to these humane principles, even as we face an enemy that has none.

For, if confronted with a barbaric threat, our first instinct is to give up that which makes us humane; bin Laden wins.

The shocking lesson in all of this is not that some people are barbaric; it is that there are others who are prepared to give up all that we supposedly believe in, in order to protect those self same beliefs from attack.

Tags: Reid, changes, International Law, impedes, impediment, War on Terror,