There is a chasm of difference between “miscarriage of justice” and failing to get off on a technicality. That difference seems lost on Corbyn. Botmeh and co-defendant Samar Alami were arrested after car bomb attacks in London in 1994 at the Israeli Embassy and the headquarters of a Jewish organisation. Twenty people were injured. Botmeh and Alami were caught with bombs, bomb-making equipment, guns and ammunition. They admitted that, and having the matériel, expertise and books to make explosives. They said they had been experimenting with bomb-making and bomb delivery but the planned use was outside the UK and they had no connection to the London bombings.

There was however ample evidence connecting them to the bombings, as was noted by the Court of Appeal, but Corbyn and his friends question this. They say there are question marks over disclosure and evidence covered by Public Interest Immunity Certificates connected to national security. Those arguments were considered, several times, by judges at the High Court and Court of Appeal, culminating in a judgment by three senior judges finding the convictions safe. The European Court of Human Rights also, unanimously, found no issue with the trial. But let us suppose an appeal had revealed serious concerns with public immunity or disclosure, what then? Would we have seen Botmeh and Alami outside the Court of Appeal with cheering supporters, including Corbyn, taking them off for a celebratory lunch before resuming their worthy activism?

Of course not. They were bomb-makers, caught with bombs and guns. They admitted as much. They would have gone to prison for a very long time for that. By what moral gymnastics could that be said to be a “miscarriage of justice”, making them people to be celebrated?

Jeremy Corbyn knows all of that. Which means either he feels because Botmeh and Alami were targeting people he found politically repellent, they ought not to be blameworthy, which would mean his moral values are utterly corrupted; or he is so fixed on a technicality that it has blinded him to all other elements of the case, which would mean that the new Labour leader is incapable of complex decision-making.

He told Iranian state broadcaster Press TV that Osama bin-Laden ought to have been brought to trial rather than shot: “The solution has got to be law.” Yet in a case where, at every stage of appeal, the law is found to have been correctly, appropriately and fairly applied, when Corbyn doesn’t like the decision he chooses to undermine the institution.

The post Jeremy’s Justice appeared first on Standpoint.

Three important new books open up different standpoints from which to examine this unpalatable fact of life. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Allen Lane, £20) summarises the remarkable life’s work of three American psychologists — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski — who have created a whole new field of research: Terror Management Theory. This is a practical as well as theoretical approach to death anxiety which, by the empirical study of its power over us, seeks to understand how so much of what we do — our creativity and our compassion, our love for others and for ourselves — is a refusal to give in to the negative thoughts, emotions and violence that grip human beings in the face of death.

Another man of medicine, Raymond Tallis, has written a more personal book: a Religio Medici for our times. The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life (Atlantic, £17.99) takes literally Montaigne’s injunction to “always keep the image of death . . . in full view”. Tallis imagines himself as his own future corpse (easier, perhaps, for a professor of geriatric medicine than for most of us), in an “endeavour to look at life — my life, your life, anyone’s life — from a virtual viewpoint outside it”. If this sounds morbid, Tallis is a surprisingly entertaining companion on his imaginary journey into the underworld. As a thoroughgoing atheist, “RT” (as he refers to himself) permits himself none of the consolations of faith that sustained Sir Thomas Browne, his great predecessor as a physician who tried to know himself. Instead, he faces his own finitude with the fortitude of a man who, having explored his own mortality, invites us to “come back from the dead to change the world or our lives”.

The third book to address death, however, does so from a completely different point of view — one that takes seriously the threat of religious fanatics who are (pace Keats) half in love with a death that is anything but easeful, whether it is others’ or their own. In Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), Jonathan Sacks draws on an even wider frame of reference than his scientific counterparts to make the argument that we can only defeat those who kill in God’s name with their own weapons — that is, by reinterpreting scriptures that seem to exclude or demonise, by demonstrating the futility of fundamentalism in its own terms, by deconstructing the dualisms that divide and the sibling rivalries that sow hatred.

The former Chief Rabbi deploys all his exegetical subtlety on the foundational texts of Abrahamic monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Genesis, to show us how figures such as Ishmael and Esau, ancient archetypes of divine rejection, are in fact the opposite. All faiths have “hard texts” that are too dangerous to read literally, Sacks suggests, but Judaism, Christianity and Islam at least share a Biblical basis for mutual toleration.

The thrust of Sacks’s book is all the more powerful because he eschews the wishful thinking that bedevils both sides of the secular/religious conflict. He makes no attempt to play down the pathology of terrorism and war inspired by the anger of those, especially Muslims, who “are determined to defeat the world by means of the word”. Now freed from the obligations of office, he can speak frankly about the betrayal by the secular West of its Judaeo-Christian values, the moral relativism that fails to defend freedom, and the “altruistic evil” of radical, politicised religion. The failure of the secular West to provide identity and meaning combines with the brute facts of demography to produce hydra-headed movements that defy even the smartest weapons and the most intelligent intelligence. After centuries of secularisation, we are witnessing the return of religion with a vengeance. The answer to the Islamists who love death more than life cannot be solely military; it has to be theological too. 

This is not an argument for failing to confront the terrorists, as well as the demagogues who inspire and the states that sponsor them. The weakest chapter of Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski comes when they try to explain the response to 9/11 as the Bush administration’s “terror management” of “death fears” that “intensified Americans’ zeal to derogate, dehumanise, demonise, assimilate, and destroy.” Such views are commonplace in the academic world: Oxford’s new Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson recently outraged Americans by contrasting British resilience with American hysteria: “The scale of the over-reaction to the 9/11 atrocity was a reflection of the fact that it was such a new experience for the US.” Both the terror management theorists and the Vice-Chancellor are mistaken. As Alexander Woolfson shows elsewhere this issue (“Rescue Iraq From Obama’s Folly”), the Islamists are indeed a mortal threat to the West that cannot be appeased, but must be defeated. Victory, however, will only be final when the West wins the battle of ideas. Jonathan Sacks gives us the intellectual tools to finish the job.

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The film is about Saturday, February 15, 2003, which saw the largest anti-war protest in British history in opposition to the war on Iraq. “Not in My Name” was the popular anti-war slogan of the day and, with a few exceptions, everyone in the film wants you to know that George Bush and Tony Blair’s toppling of Saddam Hussein didn’t happen on their behalf.

The film propagates a number of myths about the Iraq war and opposition to it. For one thing, the war was never as unpopular as the film makes out. In Britain at least a slim majority were initially in favour of it. I remember this well because I was as scathing as the protesters about Tony Blair’s apparent hoodwinking of the British people with talk of weapons of mass destruction reaching the UK within 45 minutes. (I still am, if it matters.)

Also disingenuous is the film’s portrayal of the Stop the War Coalition, whose spokespeople appear regularly in the film, as a genuine anti-war outfit — when its demagogic leaders have consistently acted as apologists for some of the most reactionary forces in the world. Once the Iraq war started, the Stoppers pledged their support “by any means necessary” to the jihadist “resistance” in Iraq, whose pacifism consisted of butchering Iraqi trade unionists and the “wrong” sorts of Muslims.

But We Are Many does get to the crux of what a great deal of anti-war activism is now about: protesters wrestling assurances from government that no killing will be carried out on their behalf. Killing per se is a different matter — the 2013 House of Commons vote against bombing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces is portrayed in the film as a spectacular victory for peace, despite Assad’s bombs continuing to rain down on children ever since — what’s important is maintaining the illusion that activists’ own hands are clean.

In reality, if one has the ability to affect the outcome of a war then one’s hands are bloodied whether one likes it or not. The filmmakers undoubtedly believe that stopping war in Iraq was a realistic possibility, but leaving Saddam in power would surely have prolonged another war — the war his regime was waging against the Iraqi and Kurdish people, where on average between 70 and 125 civilian were killed by the regime every day for Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.

One is struck by a notable absence of Iraqis in the film. This seems odd until one grasps that much of the activism on display doesn’t actually appear to be about Iraqis, Syrians or the oppressed at all. Instead, it is about blameless protesters feeling warm and fuzzy as the crowds filled London’s streets on a gloomy February afternoon. Not In My Name, the placards said. Better in somebody else’s, they might have added.

The post Iraq Myths appeared first on Standpoint.

Error number one: the collapse of the regional order into sectarian mayhem is not something that can be  contained or ignored. The flood of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean or overwhelming absorption centres on Greek and Italian islands is not going to stop until order is restored in the lands they are escaping from, and the Islamic State, or ISIS, will not lose its appeal to restive young European Muslims until it is defeated.

Error number two: borders are neither sacred nor eternal. Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen have ceased to exist since 2011. These countries have disintegrated under the weight of ethnic and religious divisions, sectarianism and civil war. To a varying degree, all four central governments have melted away — existing only on paper or as warlords of a small portion of what were once their now lost domains. Western policy should acknowledge this reality rather than insist that the territorial integrity of these states can somehow be reconstituted. It should identify those forces across these territories that are likeliest to side with Western interests — and support them.

Error number three: rather than propping up friends and likeminded allies, the West is relying on its enemies to do its bidding, under the grand illusion that the interests of countries like Iran and Turkey somehow align with Western ones. By doing so, it is empowering forces that are inimical to Western goals.

How does one fix these errors?

Europe can invest as much taxpayer money as it wants on chasing smugglers’ boats across the Mediterranean. But rather than blocking the refugees at the water’s edge in North Africa, it should realise that bringing an end to civil war in the region is a more salutary and cost-effective approach to the crisis. These refugees are escaping from war and will continue to come until the war is over.

This requires working out what can be fixed and what will stay broken. Iraq and Syria no longer exist and we should stop pretending they do. In their wake, four entities are emerging: ISIS, Iranian proxies, a hodgepodge of moderate pro-Western and Islamic forces, and the Kurds.

The West should invest more energy crushing ISIS. Since August 7, 2014, when Operation Inherent Resolve (codenamed by the British as Operation Shader) began, the number of air sorties launched and targets hit has been disappointing. The operation was spurred by the conquest of Mosul, in June 2014, by ISIS fighters. A year later, ISIS controls not only Mosul, but Ramadi and Fallujah too. Despite official insistence that ISIS is losing ground, it is not inconceivable that its fighters could take Baghdad before long. Yet they are not irresistible.

In the north-east, where it is fighting the Kurdish Peshmerga, ISIS is in retreat, despite the Kurds having insufficient military equipment. What the Kurds do not have in hardware, they make up in ingenuity and resolve. They are defending their homes and land and are determined not to lose. Western equipment is slow in coming because of fears that a sweeping Kurdish victory would create the conditions for the establishment of a Kurdish state. Turkey might be destabilised as a result. Western governments, all Nato partners of Ankara, thus prefer to prop up an increasingly authoritarian Turkish president, despite his support for Islamists in Syria, rather than give political and military backing to the stridently pro-Western Kurds, who, among other merits, are open-minded, tolerant of minorities, and respectful of women.

Western leaders increasingly believe that Iran can fix the problem for them. After eight years of fighting in Iraq, Americans are understandably weary of military adventures in Mesopotamia. Europeans were never enthusiastic to begin with. It is tempting to see Iran, given its commitment to Baghdad’s Shia-led government, fighting ISIS with more vigour and resolve than the Iraqis themselves. What Western policymakers do not see is that Iran is not fighting ISIS over some theological dispute. After all, in Syria, Iran’s proxy Bashar al-Assad has prudently avoided clashing with ISIS while ISIS has mostly battled Assad’s other Sunni foes, rather than the regime, since it came to the fore. Iran only fights those who interfere with its ambitions — and ISIS’s Iraqi operations threaten Tehran’s clients. Otherwise, Iran is perfectly content to find a modus vivendi with ISIS.

The West should thus see Iranian proxies as no less implacable a foe than ISIS. They serve Iran’s goal of dominating the region, not its nonexistent generosity toward those threatened by Sunni radicals. After all, Iran has funded and armed the Taliban in Afghanistan against the West, and Hamas in Gaza against Israel. What drives Iran is a desire not to deepen the Sunni-Shia divide.

It is tempting to pretend that the mayhem unleashed by the Arab Spring will somehow not affect us. It will. It already does. Unless suitable resources are committed and there is more direct involvement in solving these conflicts to the advantage of more moderate forces, the region’s chaos will spill over into areas that are vital to our own interests. When that happens, the cost of reversing the consequences of this tragedy will be much more significant.

The post The Grand Illusion appeared first on Standpoint.

There is nothing unusual about having a domestic Bill of Rights, interpreted by a Supreme Court but with that interpretation open to correction by the European Court in Strasbourg if it offends against any of the universal rights set out in the Convention. Almost all the Council of Europe’s 47 member states have their own native Bill of Rights, usually embedded in their Constitution: Britain is alone in having neither a written Constitution nor its own statement of the freedoms guaranteed to its citizens. We have instead the Human Rights Act, which in 1998 simply incorporated the European Convention into British law. It is much misunderstood and “the culture of liberty” to which its advocates (myself included) claimed it would be conducive has not been achieved, largely because it is perceived as foreign — a perception encouraged by a hostile media and by Europhobic politicians. The Commission on a Bill of Rights, set up by the coalition, reported in 2012 in favour of replacing the Convention, in domestic law, with a British Bill of Rights. It comprised a mass of Queen’s Counsel (for which there is no known collective noun — a “purse” of Silks, perhaps) but even this Commission did not essay the most basic task of actually drafting the “British” charter that it was recommending.

The great value of a British Bill of Rights would not be so much to the legal system (where the Convention works well enough to paper over the cracks and gaps in the common law) but as a powerful symbol of British identity and values. It is an objectively ascertainable fact that this country has contributed much more to the language and content of human rights than any other, and it is time we taught our children, and ourselves, to take some pride in this achievement — of securing parliamentary sovereignty, representative government, judicial independence, habeas corpus, trial by jury and so on. A truly British Bill of Rights, rooted in our history yet encompassing human rights initiatives since 1953 that the UK has endorsed and often led, set out in language comprehensible to “ordinary people” (the patronising phrase used by lawyers to denote people who are not lawyers) might become a driver of that “culture of liberty” that the europrosaic Convention has failed to deliver. In America, their 1789 Bill of Rights remains a bedrock of civil culture. In Canada (a country which had no particular culture to speak of), Pierre Trudeau’s objective of strengthening national identity through a Charter of Rights has largely been achieved.  In Britain, our children leave school believing that the struggle for civil rights began in Mississippi in 1964. It is time, and it will be Michael Gove’s task, to forge a document that will tell them otherwise.

The search for “British” values begins, as it must, precisely 800 years ago, when bad King John sloshed his way through Runnymede meadow to seal the Magna Carta.  He ripped it up a few weeks later, when he felt safe from the thuggish barons to whom it had vouchsafed its stated liberties. In the 17th century it was re-imagined and re-invented by two very remarkable but very different Englishmen in the course of the struggle against Stuart absolutism. Chief Justice Coke, sacked for suggesting that the King was not above the law, became a scholarly MP whose Institutes persuaded the Inns of Court that Magna Carta was a central part of the common law. Two of its provisions deserve a place in any “British” Bill of Rights:

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined . . . except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

To no-one will we sell, to no-one will we deny or delay any right or justice.

Coke drafted an updated version of this “Great Charter of the Liberties of England” — the “Petition of Right” of 1628. It emphasised that no free citizen should be “imprisoned, confined, or in sundry other ways molested” without access to habeas corpus (the process whereby anyone who lost their liberty could challenge immediately in court the lawfulness of his detention). King Charles I pretended to accept the Petition, but then (like King John) reneged, and prorogued Parliament for 11 years. The puritan MPs came back with a vengeance in 1641 to fight for those very rights that we now regard as fundamental: the sovereignty of Parliament; representative government (at least, representative of propertied men), the independence of the judiciary, religious toleration (for Jews, Quakers and Baptists, if not for Catholics) and an end to torture. These were British (to be precise, English) achievements — torture continued as a routine part of continental law for several centuries. The Civil Wars (1642-48) left one in ten Englishmen dead in muddy fields — a greater toll than the First World War — and their sacrifices for the rights of the people against the King and his bishops deserve a reference in any statement of British liberty.

The first describably “modern” statement of rights came with the work of a second — and very different — figure, namely “Freeborn John” Lilburne, who earned this moniker when he was whipped through the streets of London by order of the Star Chamber, for importing Puritan literature. His “Leveller” movement produced “The Agreement of the People”, subject of the remarkable Putney Debates in 1647 (recently staged at the National Theatre, in Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire). Several of its clauses could be reproduced, with only a few updates, in a “British” Bill of Rights, most notably the provision that all should be treated equally under the law:

That in all laws made or to be made, every person may be bound alike: and that no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings whereunto others are subjected.

There was also a ban on conscription, which (pace Prince Harry) is a right deserving of recognition, because “the matter of impressing and constraining any of us to serve in the wars is against our freedom”. The principle that electorates “ought to be indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants” might be made part of the right to democracy.

“Freeborn John” turned against Cromwell’s army junto of “tyrants, weasels and polecats” and was duly prosecuted — twice — for treason. His juries played the part ascribed to them in legal mythology, as “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”.  They acquitted Lilburne, after he had addressed them for three days, from Coke’s Institutes, about the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Some years later, an Old Bailey jury refused a judge’s direction to convict the Quakers Penn and Mead, despite being locked up without food or fire or bed or chamber pot.

Anglo-American veneration of the right to jury trial dates from this time, and it is the most notable “British” right that is entirely absent from the Convention. The reason is simple: that Convention was drawn up as a “lowest common denominator” statement and juries had ceased to exist in Europe, where Napoleon had long ago abolished them. In consequence, we have no protection against a government which might decide to abolish jury trial in certain classes of serious crime, and it is surely time that we did.

The need for a Bill of Rights to protect against executive power was accepted here a century before the Declarations of the French and American Revolutions, in the 1689 Bill of Rights. It is still in force, and it contains the first reference to free speech, namely:

That the freedom of speech and debates on proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court of place out of Parliament.

It had another useful and unique provision:

That excessive bail ought not to be required, no excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.

This ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” later found its way into the US Bill of Rights and then into international human rights conventions, as a rule against torture. It provides a good example of how felicitous phrases in Bills of Rights can come to be reimagined to meet the values of later generations. (It was originally inserted as a protest against the punishment of Titus Oates, a clergyman who had been defrocked and whipped for perjury against Catholics.)

Any “British” Bill must incorporate iconic moments in Scottish history — the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), for example, which asserted independence from the English crown; and the Claim of Right (1689), which paralleled the English Bill of Rights of the same year, and the Criminal Procedure Act of 1701 which set strict limits to detention.

We spool forward a century to the revolutionary declarations of “The Rights of Man” in America and France. They were based on “natural rights” theories that never took root here, thanks to ridicule by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham (“Nonsense on stilts”) and Karl Marx (“Bourgeois rights”). Instead, 19th century Britain gave the shining example of a practical “right” — not to be held in slavery — enforced by the Royal Navy up and down the coasts of East and West Africa. Bentham and John Stuart Mill gave meaning to the idea of liberty, and extended it to social rights, especially the right to free secular education. In due course the suffragettes demanded women’s rights, and later still came the right to free healthcare (the NHS) and the realisation of Magna Carta’s promise (“to no man will we deny justice”) with a comprehensive legal aid scheme.

There had been no talk of “human rights” until the 1930s, by which time Hitler was extinguishing them in Germany. It was in 1939 that a small group of British writers and intellectuals, headed by H.G. Wells and Viscount Sankey, a former Labour Lord Chancellor, wrote the first modern Convention for a “new world order”. J.B. Priestley and Barbara Wootton were members of the group, and A.A. Milne motored up from Pooh corner to help with the draft. The “Britishness” of their style stands out. They eschewed the messianic preambles of the French and American declarations in favour of the simple observation that “since a man comes into this world through no fault of his own” he is in justice entitled:

1. Without distinction of race or colour, to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and attention sufficient to realize his full possibilities of physical and mental development and to keep him in a state of health from his birth to his death.

2. Sufficient education to make him a useful and interested citizen, easy access to information upon all matters of common knowledge throughout his life, in the course of which he must enjoy the utmost freedom of discussion.

3. That he and his personal property lawfully acquired are entitled to police and legal protection from private violence, deprivation, compulsion and intimidation . . .

And so it went on, in fine and only occasionally dated style, promising inter alia: “There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative department”; “a man’s private house or apartment or reasonably limited garden enclosure is his castle”; “no man shall be subjected to torture, beating or any other bodily punishment, or to imprisonment with such an excess of silence, noise, light or darkness as to cause mental suffering or in infected, verminous or otherwise unsanitary quarters”.

Their charter was published in a best-selling Penguin Special, H.G. Wells on the Rights of Man, which was translated immediately into 30 languages. The Foreign Office was so taken with it that it ordered a special German version, which was dropped on Nazi stormtroopers as they stormed through France. They did not stop to read it, but President Roosevelt (a friend of Wells) did, and it contributed to his “Four Freedoms” speech and to the promise in the Atlantic Charter (January 1942) that victory would secure human rights. It was one of the drafts considered by Eleanor Roosevelt’s committee charged with producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — the forerunner of the European Convention.

The Attlee government should have appointed Hersch Lauterpacht, the world expert, to Eleanor Roosevelt’s committee, but the Foreign Office objected to him because he was Jewish and therefore “not British”. An amiable but ignorant trade union leader was appointed in his place; he did not notice that the first draft omitted any reference to trade union rights. It was the Australians who repaired this omission, and together with the Canadian lawyer who was the Committee’s Secretary they ensured that the end document could truly be described by Eleanor Roosevelt  as “the Magna Carta for Mankind”.

The European Convention was the brainchild of Winston Churchill, who saw it as a bastion against the encroachment of Stalinism. At a rousing speech at The Hague in 1948, he advocated a Charter for a Europe “guarded by freedom and sustained by law”. So the Convention’s credentials were impeccably Conservative, even down to the fact that its main opponent was the Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowitt, who preferred the plodding approach of precedent to any statement of principle. He was outmanoeuvred by the more imaginative Nye Bevan, and after the Conservatives regained office the drafting was overseen by David Maxwell Fyfe (later Lord Chancellor as Lord Kilmuir) and the Churchill government ratified it in 1953.

The Convention lay fallow, as an agreement between states, until 1966 when the Wilson government’s reforming Lord Chancellor, Gerald Gardiner, allowed the right of individual petition to the court in Strasbourg, with the UK treaty-bound to honour the judgment. There was no Conservative opposition to this step, which over time unleashed Convention rights to fill many gaps in British law. It began with a prisoner, whom the Strasbourg court insisted should be permitted to read letters from his lawyer, and really took off when the Court insisted that freedom of expression (Article 10 of the Convention) required publication of the Sunday Times investigation of the Thalidomide scandal, which British courts had banned.

Thereafter, Strasbourg acted in dozens of cases to provide remedies for human rights violations which common law could not stop and Parliament was too lazy (or too frightened) to remedy by legislation. Strasbourg decisions required law changes to end discrimination against women, against blacks and East Asians, and then against gays, and to prohibit the caning of children (in that case, against the vigorous dissent of the British judge, who said that he had been beaten at Eton and it did him no harm).

Meanwhile, the case for a Bill of Rights applicable directly in British law gathered apace: the common law was defective, and it took seven years, on average, to obtain a decision from Strasbourg. Strong opposition now came from the Left, influenced by LSE professor John Griffiths, with his book The Politics of the Judiciary. These politics, he argued, were invariably reactionary, and any Bill of Rights would give power to unelected judges appointed by Thatcherite governments to cut back traditional liberties. His thesis seemed to many on the Left to hold good, with the new Industrial Relations court and the idiosyncrasies of Lord Denning, a judge sound on middle-class values of property and freedom of speech but who could not cope with female equality and seemed to think that prisoners, trade unionists, defendants, aliens, blacks, gays and (interestingly) tax avoiders, had no rights at all. At annual meetings of the National Council of Civil Liberties (“civil liberties” were what human rights were then called) the debate see-sawed, as did Labour party policy. But with Denning’s retirement, an increasing willingness of the judiciary to upset government decisions, and the intellectual leadership of Lord Scarman and Ronald Dworkin (who predicted a “culture of liberty”) the case for a Bill of Rights strengthened.

After Labour’s defeat in the 1992 elections, the Society of Labour Lawyers finally decided in favour of a Human Rights Act. They took Roy Hattersley to dinner at Rules restaurant (the worst dining experience he had in his life, he later said) and persuaded him that the party should make this a policy promise. It did, and in 1998, the Human Rights Act made the European Convention part of British law. There seems to have been no debate over whether there should have been a home-grown Charter: the Convention was just sitting there, and was pulled “off the peg”, and without any fuss. Its great attraction to the government was that it fitted with the spin — “rights brought home” — with which the Human Rights Act was sold to the public. This slogan even had a vaguely anti-European flavour — instead of traipsing all the way to Alsace, and waiting years for European judges, we could now have our rights decided immediately by British judges. The danger that the public might turn hostile, or indifferent, to a “European” Convention was not recognised: the Human Rights Act had all-party support. 

For Conservatives, of course, the Convention had been their own work, and they were now in opposition and all too mindful of Lord Hailsham’s warning (when in opposition) against “elective dictatorship”. They were still reeling from the derision heaped upon John Major’s proclaimed alternative to a Bill of Rights, the non-statutory “Citizen’s Charter” which had not been worth the paper on which it had been printed. (Its only practical use had been to encourage public servants to wear name badges and to answer telephones more promptly.) But the most important development which led to uncritical acceptance of the Human Rights Act in 1998 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of 2,000 student protesters — by the very government to which we were about to hand over Hong Kong. MPs of all parties clamoured for the immediate introduction of a Bill of Rights in Hong Kong, and the Chinese pointed out that this would impose on them obligations more onerous than the British government faced under its own right-less domestic law. The UK insisted on the “Basic Law” for Hong Kong, and there was no objection to a quick imposition of a similar basic law which “brought home” the European Convention.

Labour’s Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, hit upon a clever idea to quieten any objections about judges thwarting the supremacy of Parliament. It was simply this: Parliament should be assumed to legislate in conformity with human rights so its laws should be interpreted “as far as possible” to have that effect. If a law could not be so interpreted, then the judges would not be allowed to strike it down (as American judges could do) but would merely issue a “declaration of incompatibility” which would be drawn to Parliament’s attention. Parliament could amend that non-conforming law, or not, as it wished, thus remaining supreme. This seemed to work well, and in time judges adapted to the idea that human rights principles were part of UK law and were helped in many cases to do a justice that they could not otherwise have dispensed.

Hostility to the European Convention today is political, and derives in part from the very fact that it is called “European”. The court decisions that have fuelled hostility to it are the long-running Abu Qatada case, about evidence obtained by torture, and the decision that the UK should allow some prisoners to vote. And, of course, Mrs May’s cat.

Abu Qatada — invariably, but wrongly, described as “bin-  Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, provided headlines hostile to human rights for ten years. The government wanted to deport him for trial in Jordan, where unreliable evidence obtained by torture would be used against him. British judges thought this was fine, because he would not himself be tortured, but Strasbourg drew the line at making any use of torture in the legal process.  He was able to hold out, courtesy of Strasbourg decisions, until Theresa May actually went to Jordan and persuaded them to alter their evidence rules, whereupon Abu Qatada (a man of the most noxious beliefs) voluntarily returned and was acquitted of terrorist crimes. In the end, it might be said, the European Convention had produced a win-win situation: acquittal of an innocent man and the alteration of unfair trial rules in a foreign country.

The other notable case where Strasbourg still disagrees with Tory MPs is over whether the right to democracy entails any rights of prisoners to vote in elections. The case is usually mis-reported: Strasbourg does not say that all prisoners must be allowed to vote, only that Parliament should come up with a law which determines which prisoners should be disenfranchised.  When the same question came before the Australian High Court, which has no Bill of Rights, it reached the same result as Strasbourg, by way of implication from the country’s democratic constitution. There, and in consequence of the court decision, the conservative Howard government brought in a law that took away the vote from prisoners serving more than three years’ imprisonment. All the UK government has to do, to comply with the Convention, is to bring in a similar law — it could get away with limiting the bar to those serving more than one year. 

“Mrs May’s cat” stands for all the lies, half-truths and misrepresentations that politicians and the media have made about the effects of the European Convention. It was at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011 that — to audience gasps — she announced that the Human Rights Act had allowed an illegal immigrant to avoid deportation because his “right to family life” required that he should not be separated from his pet cat. This was nonsense (the man had only referred to a shared cat in the context of proving that he had a long-term relationship with his partner). But politicians and journalists do not read closely reasoned court decisions — many of those blamed on the Act (especially deportation decisions) depend on European Union rules, and not the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, it must be conceded that the adoption of the Convention has damaged some important and traditional British liberties. This damage has generally been done by British judges, not the Strasbourg court itself. Take the great principle of open justice, expressed in John Lilburne’s demand that his court uphold “the first fundamental right of an Englishman” that “all courts of justice ought always to be free and open . . . no man whatsoever ought to be tried in holes or corners, or in any places where the gates are shut and barred”. Jeremy Bentham’s aphorism that justice must be seen to be done (“Publicity is the very soul of justice. It keeps the judge, whilst trying, under trial”) influenced the Earl of Halsbury’s 1911 statement of constitutional principle: “Every court in the land is open to every subject of the King.” 

But when it came to drafting the Convention, this great principle was watered down to accommodate European systems where justice often was done in secret (The Nazi “morals courts” are a notorious example, but even today Sweden holds closed courts in sexual assault cases — the best reason for Julian Assange to stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy). The weasel words of the Convention, which states that “press and public may be excluded from all or part of the trial in the interests of morals or the protection of private life if the parties so require” has given British judges a dangerous new power, which they have started  to use, to ban reporting and close the doors of the Old Bailey. A British Bill of Rights should strip it away.

Nonetheless, freedom of speech, unprotected in common law, has been much enhanced by Strasbourg itself, beginning with its decision in the Thalidomide case, which forced the UK government to liberalise the law of contempt of court. Its decision on Spycatcher, declaring it a breach of Article 10 for the Thatcher government to prohibit a book available in the rest of the world, was generally welcomed. Then there was the case — Goodwin v UK, in 1996 — where the British judiciary to a man had denied that journalists had any right in law to protect their sources (or that their sources had any right to protection). The European judges decided otherwise, in the interests of investigative journalism. After Rupert Murdoch, in what must rank as the worst-ever breach of journalistic ethics, turned over all his Sun journalists’ confidential sources to the police, it became a matter of some amusement that these journalists — the most rabid propagandists against the Convention — now demanded its protection.

That leaves the word “European” as the most powerful objection to the present Convention — a free kick for those who want it abolished. Liberty, the organisation most publicly opposed to a British Bill, was forced to admit the truth to the 2012 Commission, namely that there is a lack of public understanding and “ownership” of the Human Rights Act. The Commission reported that “many people feel alienated from a system that they regard as ‘European’ rather than ‘British’,” and added that this lack of “ownership” by the public was “the most powerful argument for a new constitutional instrument”. Of course, the answer Liberty comes up with is to provide more money for people to be educated about the European Convention.  A better alternative, perhaps, would be to educate them about the British rights they already own.

The perception that human rights is a foreign concept will not be altered by education about the European Convention, which is couched in sanitised Euro-prose without any reference to the UK’s history and experience. Its preamble is actually dishonest, speaking of “countries which have a common heritage of political traditions, ideas, freedoms and the rule of law”. Can we really ask intelligent schoolchildren to think of our “common political traditions” with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union, or before that the “ideas” of Machiavelli, or earlier still the Spanish Inquisition and the continental inquisitorial process that developed from it?

But for all its defects and in spite of any enactment of a British Bill, the European Convention must remain, as a rare long stop appeal from Supreme Court decisions. Withdrawal from the Council of Europe is hardly an option: it would not only diminish the UK’s political and diplomatic clout in an organisation of 47 countries which usually abide by court rulings (even Russia, reluctantly, pays the damages it orders) but could lead to an exodus: the Council of Europe and its Venice Commission have been vital to stability and the rule of at least some law in Eastern Europe. And abolition of the Human Rights Act will be impossible unless the significant number of Tory MPs currently opposed to its repeal are satisfied that any British Bill that replaces it provides for all the rights that it already guarantees. Moreover, the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the Convention in UK law, underpins the Good Friday Agreement and the devolution settlements, so there will be further stakeholders to satisfy that the British replacement is fit for purpose.  They cannot begin to be satisfied until the government vouchsafes them — and the rest of the nation — a sight of its proposed “British Bill”.

The only recent model was that drawn up seven years ago by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights. It had a simple if uninspiring preamble: “This Bill of Rights and Freedoms is adopted to give lasting effect to the values which the people of the UK consider to be fundamental” i.e. the rule of law, liberty, democracy, fairness and civic duty. There followed several pages of incomprehensible legal procedure and then a list of bullet points incorporating by reference the European Convention rights.

Then — new to British law — it articulates some social and economic rights (to health, care, education, housing, and a sustainable environment) which are “only justiciable to the extent they are relevant to the interpretation of legislation or the assessment of the reasonableness of the measures taken to achieve their progressive realisation”. This is an interesting way of extending some protection to post-1953 educational and social rights. However it does underline the fact that drafting a “British” Bill cannot be done, as its advocates appear to think, on a wet Sunday afternoon. Its draft will have to win substantial cross-party support, perhaps after debate at a constitutional convention, and that necessary cause of “ownership” would be achieved by endorsement at a referendum.

And so to proof of the pudding: an actual example of a “British” Bill of Rights. That is not the name I would choose to call it: too insular, and too redolent of the current sterile debate about “British” and “European” rights. “The Statute of Liberty” would be a better title, remembering how The Petition of Right described Magna Carta as “the great charter of the Liberties of England”.

Then comes the all-important preamble. It must be short but inspiring, not over-triumphalist, and teachable to teenagers. It must conjure up in its language the achievements that its subsequent rules reflect. This is not a task for lawyers, but for historians and poets and people of some imagination and literary ability, whom Mr Gove should recruit immediately. Then come the rights themselves, which should include all those in the European Convention, sometimes expressed in the language that has been used in our own historic documents (this will require judges to learn a little history in order to interpret them, which would be no bad thing).

We should take the opportunity to restate the rights that the European Convention has diminished (notably the “open justice” principle), to eliminate its weasel words (and a nasty little racist clause — 16 — that could allow governments to deny free speech to “aliens”) and to add rights that we now accept as a matter of international law — such as the rights of the disabled and the general principle of non-discrimination.

 And no British version of Liberty would be complete without some contribution from Shakespeare — the European Convention entirely overlooks the most basic humanitarian principle, that mercy must season justice.

The post Mr Gove, Here Is Our Statute of Liberty appeared first on Standpoint.

[Preamble]

1. RIGHT TO LIFE

Every person, having been born, has the right to life and to commensurate dignity throughout that life. Any killing by police or any death attributable to other agents of the state must be fully and independently investigated. No death penalty shall ever be carried out in this nation.

2. PROHIBITION OF TORTURE

No cruel or unusual punishment shall be inflicted. No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhumane treatment.

3. FREEDOM FROM COMPULSION

There shall be no conscription, nor shall any person be impressed or constrained to serve in wars. No one shall be subjected to medical or scientific experiment unless they give their free and informed consent.

4. RIGHT TO BE SET AT LIBERTY

No free person shall be taken or imprisoned or outlawed or exiled except by the lawful judgment of their peers or by the law of the land. Every person detained shall have the right to bring an action for habeas corpus, namely to be produced speedily before a court and to be set free unless the detaining authority can prove that its actions are both lawful and sensible.

5. RIGHTS ON ARREST

I. No person who has not been arrested shall be imprisoned, confined or in sundry other ways molested or disquietened without having opportunity to challenge such infringement of his or her liberty.

II. No one shall be imprisoned for debt or inability to perform a contract.

III. Persons subject to arrest in the course of police inquiries and bailed until further notice must be told, within a maximum of three months, whether they are to be prosecuted, unless a judge can be persuaded that further time is necessary for police to complete their inquiries.

IV. Persons arrested or detained on any criminal charge

a) must be informed promptly, and if practicable in language they can understand, of the reason for their arrest;

b) must be brought before a court as soon as practicable and in any event within 48 hours. In special cases, Parliament may provide for up to seven days’ detention prior to the first court appearance;

c) shall be entitled to legal advice, free of charge, as soon as practicable and in any event prior to their first court appearance;

d) must have interviews with police or persons in authority recorded electronically or by an independent third party;

e) shall be entitled to apply to a court for bail, which must not be excessive.

6. THE OPEN JUSTICE PRINCIPLE

Justice must be seen to be done, other than in cases involving children and secret patents where courts may, subject to relevant law, sit in private. Every court in the land shall be open to the media and the public, unless it is established beyond reasonable doubt that justice cannot be done other than by their exclusion for part of the proceedings, or that such exclusion is essential to protect the lives of witnesses or others or to protect national security. In any such case, the judgment of the court must be delivered publicly.

7. RIGHT TO TRIAL BY JURY

Every person charged with a criminal offence carrying a maximum prison sentence of more than one year has a right (which only they may waive) to trial by jury.

8. THE RIGHT TO FAIR TRIAL

I. In the determination of civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law.

II. Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

III. Everyone brought to trial for a criminal offence has the following minimum rights:

a) to have the prosecution evidence disclosed to them well before the trial begins;

b) to have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of their defence and to communicate with legal representatives;

c) to attend their own trial and defend themselves in person or through legal assistance of their own choosing or, if they do not have sufficient means to pay for legal assistance, to be given it free when the interests of justice so require;

d) to examine or have examined witnesses against them and to obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on their behalf under the same conditions;

e) to have the free assistance of an interpreter if they cannot understand or speak English;

f) if convicted, to have the right to ask a higher court for leave to appeal against conviction and/or sentence;

g) if sentenced, to have judges mindful that mercy seasons justice.

9. NO PUNISHMENT WITHOUT LAW

I. No one shall be found guilty of any criminal charge on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under UK or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the offence was committed.

II. No person may be punished more than once for the same offence.

10. FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

I. Every person lawfully present in the UK has freedom to move within it, and to choose where in the country to live. Every holder of a UK passport shall be entitled, subject to any law or court order, to leave the country and if a UK citizen he or she shall have the right to a passport and shall be guaranteed the right to return. Every person accepted for residence in the UK shall be afforded the opportunity to become a citizen in due course.

II. The UK will entertain asylum claims from any persons who come to or within its boundaries and claim they are refugees under the Refugee Convention 1951 and can establish they are fleeing from a country where they are, or have a well-founded fear of being, persecuted in a way that will endanger their life or that of close family members. A precondition of such a claim must be their preparedness to accept the rights and responsibilities set forth in this statute.

III. No person shall be accepted for residence status or citizenship unless he or she can understand and accept the rights in this statute and can affirm that they accept its responsibilities.

IV. Article 16 of the European Convention of Human Rights, allowing the government to impose any political restrictions on aliens despite their rights of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom from discrimination, shall not in the United Kingdom provide any authority or argument for taking these rights away from them.

11. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

I. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to hold and express opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by government.

II. Practitioners of journalism shall have a right to protect their sources, subject only to overriding considerations of public interest.

III. The above rights shall be accorded especial importance in any court proceedings in which they are properly invoked.

IV. This right shall create a presumption in favour of publication, rebuttable only if the restriction sought to be placed upon it is essential in the interests of democratic society to guard against incitement to crime or to safeguard national security or to enable other citizens to stop lies being told about them, or to preserve confidential information or to protect their privacy as defined in Article 12.

V. Citizens have a right to know about the workings of their government. In addition to their rights under the Freedom of Information Act, and subject to iv) above, all Cabinet papers and other government documents shall be made available for public inspection within ten years of their creation.

VI. These rights may be invoked by media organisations on behalf of their journalists and editors, and/or on behalf of their readers, viewers or listeners.

12. RIGHT TO PRIVACY

Everyone has the right to have his or her home and genuine family life respected and to prevent passing on, or publication of, intimate personal details, or disclosure of personal matters concerning children in their care. Public authorities shall not interfere with the exercise of this right unless such interference serves the public interest and is in accordance with court-authorised surveillance or legally prescribed data-protection principles or ethics codes promulgated for the media by representative or statutory bodies.

13. FREEDOM OF THOUGHT, CONSCIENCE AND RELIGION

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, to manifest religion or belief in worship or other forms of observance and to expound the tenets of that religion to others. This freedom shall not extend to religions or other movements that preach hatred or incite violence or urge discrimination on grounds of sex or race or sexual orientation and shall not protect religions from criticism made by persons exercising their free speech rights under Article 11.
   

14. FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY AND ASSOCIATION

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, peaceful protest, and to freedom of association with others. No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety of for the prevention of disorder or crime or the protection of the rights and freedoms set out in this statute.

15. RIGHT TO OWN PROPERTY

I. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others, and such property if lawfully acquired must be protected by the state against private violence, deprivation, compulsion or intimidation.

II. Nobody shall be deprived of his or her property arbitrarily.

III. There shall be no confiscation of private property by the state other than when it is in satisfaction of a judgment of debt or if it is reasonably suspected to be the proceeds of crime or to be held for a corrupt purpose.

IV. The state may acquire private property but only on just terms.

16. RIGHT TO WORK

I. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to safe and healthy conditions of work and to protection against unemployment;

II. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work;

III. Everyone who works has the right to fair remuneration, ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

IV. Everyone has the right, without victimisation, to form and join trade unions for the protection of their interests and in the course of that protection to have trade unions represent them in collective bargaining and other lawful actions.

V. Full-time workers have the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, including sick pay.

17. RIGHT TO WELL-BEING

I. Everyone without distinction has a right to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and attention from the National Health Service, sufficient to realise their physical and mental development and to keep them in a state of health from their birth onwards.

II. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for their health and well-being, including necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond their control.

III. The government is required to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of the rights in (i) and (ii) above.

IV. Everyone has the right to due respect when treated in any hospital or nursing home or care centre or medical surgery, and where practicable to give informed consent before undergoing any invasive surgical procedure.

18. RIGHT TO EDUCATION

I. Everyone has the right to education sufficient to make them useful and interested citizens. Education shall be free and compulsory, at least at primary and until an intermediate secondary level. Technical and professional education shall be open to all and higher education shall be appropriately accessible.

II. The government is required to take reasonable measures, within its available resources, to make technical and professional education and higher education progressively available and affordable and to provide easy access to information through public libraries which offer internet facilities as well as wide-ranging reading material.

III. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and the values that are set out in this Statute.

IV. Parents have a right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children, subject to the right of the government to set curricula and to refuse approval to schools where teaching is or is likely to breach (iii) above or otherwise infringes rules set by Parliament.

19. THE RIGHT TO DEMOCRACY

Every citizen and/or resident and/or taxpayer over the age of 18 has the right and must have the opportunity, without discrimination:

I. to take part in government, directly by standing for Parliament or by voting, freely and secretly, for chosen representatives in electorates that ought to be indifferently proportioned according to the number of inhabitants.

II. to have access, on terms of equality and merit, to the public service and to all public offices.

20. RIGHTS OF PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATIVES

I. Freedom of speech in debates or any proceedings in Parliament may not be impeached or questioned in any court of law.

II. MPs shall be entitled freely to communicate with their constituents, and vice-versa. An MP’s parliamentary office shall not be subject to search or interference, save with the permission of the Speaker of the relevant House, who shall if practicable seek the assurance of the Attorney-General that the search is necessary for the investigation of a serious crime.

III. Parliament shall not be disturbed, and MPs shall not be subject to arrest or other forcible process in Parliament or its precincts, except by permission of the Speaker, once the Attorney-General has confirmed that such action is necessary to investigate serious crime.

IV. In all other respects, MPs and peers shall not be above the law.

21. RIGHT TO EFFECTIVE JUSTICE

I. No one shall be denied justice by virtue of excessive court fees or judicial delay.

II. Everyone whose rights and freedoms set out in this statute are violated shall have an effective remedy by way of access to a court or a tribunal empowered to apply the provisions of this Statute.

22. PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION

I. Everyone is equal before the law. In all laws made or to be made, every person may be bound alike; and no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth or place may confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings whereunto others are subjected.

II. The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Statute shall be secured without discrimination on grounds of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a minority, property, birth or other status.

III. In the implementation of government policy, public servants shall in all decisions that involve the rights stated in sections 16-18 above, bear in mind their duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

23. RIGHTS OF CHILDREN

I. Every child has the right —

a) to a name and a nationality from birth;

b) to family care, parental care, or adequate and appropriate alternative care if removed  in accordance with law from a dangerous family environment;

c) to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation;

d) to be protected from exploitative labour practices;

e) not to be detained except as a matter of last resort and then only for the shortest appropriate period of time.

II. A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child.

III. Every person under 18 years of age who is detained pending or during trial or after conviction must be segregated from detained adults.

24. RIGHTS OF DISABLED PEOPLE

The government shall ensure, within its available resources, that all persons who are disabled shall be vouchsafed full enjoyment of the rights set out in this Statute without discrimination or diminution on the grounds of their disablement. They shall have the right to live in their community, and shall in particular have, wherever practicable,

I. the opportunity to choose their place of residence and where and with whom they live to the same extent as others;

II. access to a range of in-house, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to prevent isolation from the community;

III. access on an equal basis and in a way that is responsive to their needs, to community services and facilities that are made available to the general population.

25. RIGHT TO A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT

Everyone has the right:

I. to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing;

II. to have the environment protected, for the benefit of present and future generations, through reasonable legislative and other measures that:

a) prevent pollution and ecological degradation;

b) promote conservation and protect native flora and fauna, and areas necessary to maintain biological diversity and ecosystems;

c) secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources while promoting justifiable economic and social development;

d) preserve properties and places of historic or cultural significance;

e) establish a planning system that ensures encroachments upon areas of natural beauty or heritage value are not approved unless by a fair, transparent and non-corrupt process, which takes that value into account.

III. To timely and adequate assistance in the event of fire, flood, cyclone or other natural catastrophe.

26. DEROGATION IN TIME OF EMERGENCY

In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation the government may take measures derogating from its obligations under this statute to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation. However there shall be no derogation from Articles 1 and 2.

27. DUTIES

I. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the full and free development of their personality is possible.

II. In the exercise of these rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject to such limitations as are determined by law for the purpose of securing the recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for meeting the just requirements of public order and general welfare in a democratic society.

III. Nothing in this declaration may be interpreted as implying for any group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights or freedoms set forth in this statute.

IV. All persons present in the United Kingdom, however briefly, have a duty to obey the law.

The post A British Bill Of Rights appeared first on Standpoint.

Conservatives also use crimes against humanity to shore up their barricades in the culture wars. To them, the distinction between Islam and Islamism must be a distinction without a difference. All Muslims are tainted because Islam is an alien and barbaric creed, which makes every believer a potential criminal. Once again, they conscript psychopaths, but in this instance they use them to justify immigration controls, law and order, and a recognition of the superiority of the “Judaeo-Christian” culture. (Given that the Christians spent two millennia persecuting the Judaeos, I am not sure conservatives should offer such a warring “culture” as an example to anyone.)

Not the smallest of the virtues of Deeyah Khan’s documentary Jihad: A British story (ITV) is that she provides evidence to back every attempt to rationalise Islamism and then knocks it away. I should declare an interest and say that I think Khan is completely bloody marvellous. She was originally a glamorous and gifted pop star; music critics predicted she would become the “Muslim Madonna”. But religious reactionaries do not take well to “their” women getting ideas above their station. Their threats to her and her family forced Khan to flee twice: first from her native Norway and then from Britain, which she naively believed was a liberal haven, whose citizens would not tolerate the violence of the Muslim far-Right. She abandoned her ambitions, and went into exile in America. Rather than go under, as many would have done, she came back — rejuvenated and reinvented — as a feminist filmmaker. Her first documentary on the “honour” killing of a Kurdish girl in Britain won all kinds of awards, and her Jihad: A British Story (ITV) shows her skill and insight once more.

Over 18 months she convinced two generations of jihadis, ex-jihadis, and men and women teetering on the edge of committing to jihad to open up. Her central character is the remarkable figure of Abu Muntasir, a Bangladeshi immigrant to Britain. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a vicious and charismatic Islamic extremist preacher, who went to fight in Kashmir, Burma and Afghanistan and inspired hundreds of young men to imitate him. How?

A simple but to my mind plausible answer is that the police never stopped him. Muntasir was never arrested, never even interviewed. Looking back on the policing of radical Islam in the last years of the 20th century, you can see that the authorities were as naive as the academics. Like the shallow theorists, they could not believe that Islamists meant what they said. Surely they were just letting off steam or striking poses?

It helped that Muntasir looked like the leader of a warrior band. Standing at 6ft 7in, muscular and with a flowing beard, he was the heroic father figure the young men who followed him had never had. Interviewed by Khan long after their frenzy had passed, a few of his former followers cited motives that would please the Left. One described how whites would shout “Paki go home” at him “as regularly as the call to prayer”. Racism changes how you think, of course. It has changed an old friend of mine, a secular British Pakistani, who has seen what Islamists do close-up as a reporter in the Middle East and Asia. He’s still an atheist, but says now, “My father was called a ‘coon’, I was called a ‘Paki’ and my children will be called ‘Muslims’.” The name changes, the prejudice remains the same. When I talk to him, he can barely abide criticisms of the Islamism he once denounced because he is so worried about the racism around him.

Another of Khan’s interviewees spoke of how he was angry against society because he was born with a withered arm and leg. A woman said she was angry because she had been sexually abused, but the British police had done nothing. Maybe these aren’t convincing “root causes”, but they would pass muster in some left-wing circles.

Conservatives, meanwhile, could find much to boost them. Muntasir believed the non-Muslim world was Satanic, and the allies of Satan had to be destroyed. He appeared to be justifying every clash-of-civilisations hypothesis.

Yet the rationalisations did not make full or even partial sense. Khan cleverly intercut her interviews with men on the edge of jihadism with clips of two men from Birmingham who were diverted from petty crime, and became better people, by finding Islam. The determinism which holds that Islam must produce a clash of civilisations not only ignores the vast range of contradictory beliefs within a supposedly monolithic religion, and that Shias and Sunnis are currently slaughtering each other across the Middle East, but forgets that Muslims are more likely to be the victims of Islamism than Islamists.

As for my comrades on the Left, if you are a victim of racism, why join a racist and anti-Semitic movement? If you are a victim of sexual abuse, why join a movement that demeans, rapes and enslaves women? Maajid Nawaz, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who rejected theocracy so thoroughly he could soon be the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London, put it best when he wrote: “Ok far-lefty fellow-travellers of Islamism, I’m a state-school, brown, stabbed-at-by-neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, Muslim, divorced, estranged from his child, ex-Islamist, tortured ex-prisoner who’s been mandatorily profiled & DNA’d under schedule 7 at Heathrow airport & blacklisted from countries. I am every grievance you harp on about. And yet your first-world bourgeois brains malfunction because I’m not spewing hate & fitting in your little angry Muslim box. Are you feeling slightly privileged yet?”

Fascism and Communism ought to have taught us that if totalitarian thought systems give men the power and the ability to commit enormous crimes in the name of Utopia they will do it. But it seems as if we have to learn that all over again, just as we must learn to fight all over again.

The post The Reality Of Radicalisation appeared first on Standpoint.

In 2003, Miller, a senior investigative reporter for the New York Times, was embedded in Iraq with US units searching for Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, the weapons in whose existence the Times, like most intelligence agencies and many nuclear inspectors, then believed. For 20 years, Miller had produced WMD scoops from the Middle East and Russia. Her investigative reports began with anonymous tips from government contacts. The investigative part was substantiating their reports. Miller’s “diva” colleagues did not appreciate her “sharp elbows” and “bigfooting” of office turf, but at least her bravery matched her ambition. She witnessed the aftermath of Hezbollah’s 1983 truck-bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, broke the story of Hamas’s fundraising in the United States, and inspected “decaying Soviet biolabs”. The Times’s reviewers praised her book on germ warfare as “the most important book of the year”, and her memoir of the Middle East as “a rich tapestry . . . as intricate as a Persian carpet”. In 2002, Miller was part of the team of Times reporters awarded a Pulitzer for their paper’s coverage of 9/11 and al-Qaeda.

For intelligence on Iraqi WMD, Miller relied on “sources who refused to be named”, and defectors procured by Ahmed Chalabi, the shady Shia exile who led the Iraqi National Congress. The Times endorsed the invasion; its editor, Bill Keller, preened as a “reluctant hawk”. Yet despite the promise on the Times’s masthead, not all of its news was “fit to print”. Miller had a hand in ten of the 23 articles that the Times disowned in 2004. Several of them began with tip-offs from the CIA, whose director, George Tenet, had assured President Bush that the case for war was a “slam dunk”. Miller repeated the CIA’s claim that, having tried to procure smallpox strains from ex-Soviet scientists, Saddam was working on “mobile germ labs”. She also reported the Agency’s “high confidence” that Saddam was importing high-strength aluminium tubes as “components of centrifuges to enrich uranium”.  

The absence of evidence for Iraq’s “Weapons of Miller’s Description”, and the plentiful evidence of American ineptitude after the invasion, damaged America’s global standing, as well as that other priceless asset, the reputation of the Times. Miller was accused of being a “closet neocon”, and a “credulous dupe”. The hard-left academic Juan Cole, who knows whereof he speaks, called her a “useful idiot”. In 2005, having just served three months in jail for refusing to identify a government source in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, Miller left the Times, bearing a pay-off and a grudge. She accuses her editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson, of scapegoating her.

This appears to be the case, but the Times’s collective sins of incompetence and credulity were also Miller’s sins. Instead of retaining the Duke of Wellington as counsel, Miller wishes always to apologise and explain. Her defence is a sustained plea of diminished responsibility. Her parents’ divorce made her susceptible to seduction by influential older men, especially those bearing career-enhancing gifts. She was never trained as an investigative journalist: the Times hired her in order to dodge an affirmative action lawsuit, and let her learn on the job. Steven Engelberg, the superior who had restrained her overstatements, took another position, forcing her to write her own articles. She never spoke with “Curveball”, the source of the mobile germ lab story. She would have investigated the aluminium tubes, had her father not distracted her by dying. The Iraqis “behaved like they had weapons”, and the “intelligence assessments” believed them. She was only following the story.

Yet Miller does not follow her own story. Her accurate articles are footnoted, with links so that we can admire them online. But her Iraqi WMD stories receive neither footnotes nor links. Having handicapped the reader, she exculpates herself by lawyerly quibbling over details that cannot be checked; so much for the legal spirit. Not that Miller is good on details. Her claim to have been “present at the creation” of the anti-American jihad in Beirut insults the hostages taken at the American embassy in Tehran.

Miller’s defence proves the prosecution’s case. The injustice lies not in the conviction, but in the sentence: Miller was no worse than her colleagues, and her editors shot an unpopular messenger. Miller tells that story — she buries her hatchets in the back, not the ground — but she misses its meaning. The real “story” here is not Miller, but the machinery of her rise and fall: an easy, corrupt collusion between anonymous politicians, eager journalists, and desperate editors.

The empty grandeur of the Times’s staff resembles that of estate agents who, familiar with desirable properties, assume the airs of owners. Miller was part of that vanity. She mourns the glory days of the open expense account and the closed shop: before the “pernicious” bloggers took over, the Ritz Carlton in Washington, DC embroidered her initials on its pillows. Proudly, she relates how, over dinner, she and her husband, the publisher Jason Epstein, convinced President Bush’s adviser Philip Zelikow that W.W. Norton would be the ideal imprint to publish The 9/11 Report. She seems not to understand that this scene might, like her Iraq reportage, exemplify the decay of public life.

“I don’t blame myself,” Noah Cross says in Chinatown. “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.” The Iraq disaster has incapacitated America. Four years after President Obama promised that “the tide of war is receding”, he is up to his ankles in Iraq, and in over his head with Iran. The “pivot to Asia” sank in the sand, and the blood-dimmed tide is rising. Intelligence, faulty or otherwise, is still in short supply. The story must finish before it can be written, and who now expects a happy ending?

The post Washington Blame Game appeared first on Standpoint.

The media naturally framed the issue as one of freedom of speech. For the Jewish community the issue was that four Jews had been targeted and murdered because they were Jews. France now enjoys the unhappy distinction of having more (and more persistent) anti-Semitic attacks than any other country in Europe and possibly the world. As a result the Jewish population is expected in the next few years to have fallen from 500,000 to 400,000—a whole 20 per cent drop. France is thus today in the same situation that Germany was in 1933. This is not only deeply shameful for all Europeans but it is a fact which ought to make one sit up very smartly indeed, and not only because we all thought that we would never face another 1933. The Jewish population of Europe has been the great bearer and leader of Enlightenment values for two centuries now. There is no need to rehearse all the Jewish contributions to science, the economy, literature, medicine and culture in general. Any educated Gentile knows perfectly well that the Jewish minorities across Europe play an absolutely primary role in all those societies, leavening the loaf as it were. Jews are very precious people and only societies not in their right mind—like contemporary Russia, Nazi Germany or much of the Middle East—would happily watch their local Jewish minority diminish in number. A projected drop of 20 per cent in the French Jewish population in just a few years is a sign that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

In Copenhagen too one man was killed because he was a Jew and the terrorist was clearly attempting to gain access to a synagogue where he would have found eighty Jews, many of them children. This fact—and the visions which swim in the head of what might have happened—caused one member of the Jewish community there to say, “We are living the nightmare.” Netanyahu’s subsequent appeal for all European Jews to re-settle in Israel expressed the pessimism about Europe as a whole as a safe place for Jews to live in which, though alarmist, is already widespread in America and becoming increasingly  common among European Jews too.

Each time there is some new outrage committed by Islamic terrorists, Europeans go through a sort of lobster quadrille. There is immediate anger against Islam and Muslims in general, quickly countered by denunciations of Islamophobia. Muslim clerics will be found who denounce the terrorists as anti-Islamic and liberal Muslims will be produced who demand freedom of speech and the press just as loudly as the rest of us. Indeed, the media will quickly draw attention to the fact that there are Muslim victims too, like one of the policemen cold-bloodedly shot down in Paris. Having bounced around this sounding box the media then draws the lesson that anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic manifestations are all as bad as one another and that being good liberals means that we should all avoid taking any view at all about whole communities and instead treat everyone as individuals. This sounds right and reasonable and all men of goodwill subscribe to such sentiments.

However, the fact that Jews are now fleeing France in exactly the way they fled Nazi Germany in 1933 suggests that this just isn’t good enough—not even nearly good enough. Of course, this is not to say that France today resembles Hitler’s Germany: the very opposite. It is an unimpeachably liberal republic. But the particular liberal compromise with Islam that it represents is actually having the same results that the Nazis wanted. The fact that all the Jewish victims of the Paris supermarket attack were buried in Israel, not France, is a powerful signal of the mood. Even in death, and even in an Israel continually threatened by rocket attacks, French Jews feel more secure there than they do in France.

The basic sociology of the situation is that there are almost five million Muslims in France out of a total population of 65 million. (In Denmark Muslims constitute nearly five per cent of the population.) As elsewhere in Europe, this population tends only to rise, thanks to a positive natural increase while the host population is declining, and the continuous addition of Muslim refugees and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. Similarly, Muslims are strongly pratiquant (while the host population is ever more secular), which means that Muslims have a far stronger community sense than other groups and also that they weigh far more heavily than their numbers might suggest in the religious and cultural life of the country. They are also simply far more determined about promoting their distinctive identity than other groups. They want their women to dress differently, they want the sexes to be kept apart, they want Muslim schools and Koranic education and the extremists among them may commit terrorist acts. One could admit any number of Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians or Shintoists to one’s country without facing any of these distinctive demands or pressures.

The crude fact appears to be that you can’t have as many Muslims as this in France—or even in Denmark, where there has been a growing pattern of Muslim hostility to the tiny Jewish community left there after the Holocaust—without generating pressures which cause the Jews to flee. It will be objected, of course, that the reason for the alienation of many Muslim youths is their high unemployment rate and the poor conditions in the banlieues. That is true enough, but there is no sign at all of these conditions diminishing: rather the contrary. Similarly, the “reason” for the wave of anti-Semitic attacks in France in 2012-15 relates to anti-Israeli feeling provoked by events in Gaza and on the West Bank. (I put inverted commas round “reason” because such events would not cause similar reactions by other groups. Throughout the long struggle for Indian independence, after all, there was no Hindu terrorism in Britain.) But there again, neither Israel nor anti-Israeli feeling is going to go away: everything suggests that Israelis and Palestinians will fight their own Hundred Years’ war.

So the facts of life are that the things which have provoked a minority of French or Danish Muslims to violence will continue to provoke them. If you allow for those facts and if you have a solid and growing mass of five million Muslims you are bound to find among them many thousands who will be Islamic fundamentalists, who will go off to fight in Syria, Yemen, Iraq or elsewhere and who will also be prone to carry out anti-Semitic and terrorist attacks in their host nation. In practice, the state then finds itself powerless to protect its Jewish minority. All French Jewish schools and synagogues have been under armed guard for several years but this has not prevented continuing terrorist outrages. It seems very likely that Amedy Coulibaly was intending to attack a Jewish school and synagogue but ended up killing a policewoman instead before heading for the kosher deli, clearly in search of more Jews to capture or kill. Without any doubt the terrorists will succeed in making more French Jews flee.

Moreover, a number as large as five million (or Denmark’s five per cent) makes the task of the local intelligence services in trying to prevent such things simply impossible. There are too many people to watch and for every terrorist there are bound to be many more sympathisers willing to contribute money, safe houses and so on. This is why the French intelligence service, just like its British counterparts, continually warns that though it may foil many Islamic terrorist plots, it cannot possibly prevent them all. Which is to say, we are bound to have more Charlie Hebdos as well as more Salman Rushdie-style fatwas. The only way to stop this would be to allow a regime of sweeping preventive detention of all suspected Muslim zealots. Most Europeans would find this incompatible with civil liberties. Some will hope that getting more Muslim religious leaders to denounce violence will make a difference, but thus far there is no evidence that this will stop the extremists.

It is no good pretending that the extremists were only a tiny minority. In the wake of the attacks the online Daily Beast reported that Parisian Muslims were prone to argue that they had all been staged: “It was a conspiracy designed by the Jews to make Muslims look bad.” In some Muslim areas teachers reported that as many as 80 per cent of their students refused to observe the minute’s silence decreed for the victims and some said openly that they supported the attackers. The truth is simply that to have as many as five million Muslims in your country—perhaps even just to have 2.8 million, as in Britain—means that you are bound to have at least several thousand young people liable to be tempted by jihadism. The same applies to Denmark and indeed to many other European countries.

Liberals tend to hope that their local Muslims will gradually become more integrated and more secular. This may happen in timebut it will take several more generations. Long before that process is complete there will be no Jews left in France or Denmark. The real question is how many Jews there will be left in all of Europe. After all, the Muslim population is growing everywhere and the Jewish populations of most European countries are well educated and quite prosperous. They are thus highly mobile and can easily leave for Israel, Australia or North America.

The only way that this is not going to happen is if European countries find some way of diminishing their Muslim populations. Again, it is difficult to imagine ways of doing that which will not meet strong objections from liberal opinion. Indeed, many political leaders—like Barack Obama—have been keen to denounce terrorism in general, leaving out the word “Islamic”: many are so nervous of upsetting Muslim opinion that they are not even willing to call a spade a spade.

All these remarks apply with equal force to Britain, Germany and the rest of Europe. The German newspaper which reprinted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons was immediately the victim of an arson attack. Danish Jews are such a tiny group that they are down to three synagogues but this has not protected them from increasing threats. In Britain there was much mirth and some outrage over the misdescription of Birmingham as a Muslim city by the Fox News commentator, Steven Emerson—and rightly so. Birmingham, it was pointed out, was only 22 per cent Muslim. But not long ago it was zero per cent Muslim, and already there have been attempts at an Islamic takeover of schools there. As the Muslim percentage of the city’s population heads on up towards 30 per cent one can’t help wondering whether there might be more such attempts. One wonders, too, quite how secure the Birmingham Jewish community feels—and whether its numbers are already diminishing.

In recent weeks we have seen Jewish schools and synagogues in Britain placed under armed police guard. Last year the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain hit a 30-year high. During the recent fighting in Gaza things became so bad that it almost seemed that we would see a British kristallnacht. Our Jewish community is already down to 290,000 and Maureen Lipman is far from the only British Jew considering emigration.

This is an utterly shameful situation when one thinks not only of the huge Jewish contribution to British life but also of the fact that many British Jews came to this country as refugees because it was a bastion of freedom. Even in 1940 they could feel secure here: but are we any longer the Britain of 1940? After all, British Jews are an entirely peaceable community; they threaten no one. Attacking them for what Israel does is no more acceptable than attacks on the Muslim community would be because of the (much worse) deeds committed by IS or al-Qaeda.

Posing the problem like this will, of course, be unpopular. I have Jewish friends who tell me that although they frequently go to Israel they don’t really like a society mainly composed of Jews, that Jews do better as minorities in other countries. It is the sort of crude generalisation that, generally speaking, only community members are allowed to make about their own community. But the situation is now so serious that we need to break out of such constraints and face the facts about what the growth of Muslim communities means. As things stand, the liberals whose main concern is to denounce Islamophobia are in fact agreeing to expel the Jews from Europe. This was exactly what Hitler wanted to achieve.

As the euphoria of the giant marches and the orchestrated solidarity with Paris dies down, what we have to deal with is that unless we stop and reconsider quite fundamentally, we will simply be carrying out the programme of the Third Reich.

The post Can Europe’s Jews Feel Safe Alongside Muslims? appeared first on Standpoint.

The different schools of Islamic law are unanimous that the punishment for blasphemy is death. It is for this reason that the Federal Shari’at Court in Pakistan removed the alternative of life imprisonment for blaspheming against the Prophet of Islam and made the death sentence mandatory for this offence. The results of having such a law are well-known. Large numbers of Christians, Ahmadis (members of a heterodox sect) and even Muslims have been accused of blasphemy, tried and sentenced to death. Even people with a history of mental illness have not escaped the rigours of this law and recently, the Lahore High Court rejected the appeal of Asia Bibi, a poor peasant woman, against the sentence of capital punishment imposed on her for allegedly blaspheming in the course of witnessing to her Christian faith.

The law has been widely misused to settle personal scores and to gain an advantage in matters like property disputes. Once a charge is made, the accused’s fate is sealed. Both police and judiciary are intimidated by extremists and, at least in the lower courts, there can be only one result: conviction and the death sentence. In the case of Asia Bibi, the worrying development is that the higher courts too now seem to have been intimidated. It is concerning also that Pakistan’s example is being followed by other nations. The case of Raif Badawi, who has recently been convicted to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam in Saudi Arabia, is but one example of this tendency.

An important feature of the general atmosphere created by this law is a sharp increase in mob violence against those accused of blasphemy and this extends to their family, their home and even the village or community in which they live. There have been numerous attacks on places of worship, schools and Christian and Ahmadi communities because someone within these is alleged to have blasphemed. Mobs can be incited by someone with a personal grudge and mosque loudspeakers are used to gather crowds which are then encouraged to mete out “rough justice”.

Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of thought, conscience and religion and also the right to manifest our beliefs in teaching, practice, worship and observance. It also guarantees our right to change our beliefs. Although most Muslim countries have adopted this and other declarations, it has often been with a declared or mental reservation: insofar as they are consistent with sharia. This has led to various restrictions ranging from those on free speech to restriction and even prohibition of worship. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that Islamic declarations on human rights, such as the Cairo Declaration (1990) made by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, either omit Article 18 altogether or significantly alter its content to bring it closer to the requirements of sharia.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has long campaigned, with near-success, to have defamation of religion made an internationally recognised offence. It is only gradually that non-Muslim states have seen the implications of such a law for freedom of speech and of the press. There has also been pressure, by various Islamic organisations in the West, to bring in legislation against “hate speech”, which would restrict freedom to criticise or satirise religious beliefs. In Britain, an attempt by the previous government to bring in such legislation forbidding “hate speech” was only qualified by last-minute amendments in the House of Lords safeguarding academic discussion, preaching and propagation of secular and religious beliefs which might otherwise have been construed as hate speech against a particular religion or lifestyle. This has not prevented over-zealous police or other officials from trying to stop Christian evangelism in “Muslim areas”, forbidding the display of biblical texts in public places or arresting street preachers who were thought to be “offending” this or that pressure group.

In an important intervention in the Daily Telegraph, Dr Tim Winter (aka Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad), a senior Muslim theologian at Cambridge University, points out that image-making is itself an offence in Islam but then goes on to claim that what has immeasurably compounded this offence for Muslims is that the Charlie Hebdo, and the Danish cartoons, before that, were intended to “mock, deride and wound”. He goes on to say that to laugh at the Prophet cannot be understood as free speech but does not say whether academic discussion of him or apologetic by polemical secularists or Christians would be or could be. Using the by now well-known tactic of gaining domination through claiming victimhood, he appeals to Muslim lawyers in Britain to use existing hate speech, slander and libel legislation to trigger a series of complex cases which would lead to the protection of Muslims from “abuse”. As with the OIC’s exertions regarding the defamation of religion on the international stage, is this a thinly-veiled attempt to have some kind of blasphemy law recognised nationally?

What is the difference between Asia Bibi and numerous others on death row, having been convicted on blasphemy charges, and the killings on the streets of Paris and Copenhagen? Is judicial execution different from these extra and anti-judicial atrocities? Why does the international community tolerate one but not the other? Is it because Westerners are involved in one but not the other?

We can no longer avoid a serious discussion about blaspheming in Islam and the culture around it if we are to understand and to prevent both judicial execution and extra-judicial murders. As with apostasy, the Koran seems not to provide for any punishments in this life for blasphemy against God and the Prophet though again, as with apostasy, various unrelated verses are pressed into service by those who would find such a punishment in their scripture. The most the Koran does is to say that such people are cursed in this life and in the next where God will mete out to them “a humiliating punishment” (33:57). It is claimed that the execution of poets, such as Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf in 624 AD, for insulting the Prophet sets a precedent for executing blasphemers today. Others say that these poets were executed for inciting sedition and not merely for blasphemy.

Also, there are well-known stories of the Prophet forgiving some who had insulted him. It is incumbent on Muslims to follow the Sunnah, or practice of their Prophet. Which aspect will they follow today? A great deal depends on what answer is given to this questions.

Some scholars have suggested that there should be a high bar set for entertaining allegations of blasphemy. Those who make such accusations must themselves be pious Muslims and, if a false accusation is made, the penalty for this must be there same as for the offence of blasphemy itself. From time to time, proposals are put forward which will make it procedurally more difficult for such allegations to be brought but the fundamental questions remain that of free speech and the balance to be struck between this and civility in society, as well as the need for public order. Are there any limits on freedom of expression?

The UN Declaration itself provides for the possibility of restrictions for the purpose of securing due recognition for the right and the freedom of others and for meeting the just requirements of “morality, public order and the general welfare”. What does this mean? Do the limitations have to do only with law and can we include custom and convention in public life and the media?

In this sense the events in Paris which have highlighted the role of satirical magazines like Charlie Hebdo have also obscured the serious discussion which needs to take place about the authenticity of the extremists’ claim that they represent “true Islam”. Such a discussion needs to take place not only among Muslims but with all those who have to live in Muslim lands or who have Muslims as neighbours, colleagues and fellow-citizens. How is the Koran and the Sunnah to be interpreted and whose interpretation is correct? To what sources are the extremists appealing and can such appeals be countered?

In a free world the founders of all major religions will come under scrutiny: Moses, Muhammad and Jesus are not excluded from such study. What was their message? What were their aims? What kind of people were they? These are legitimate areas for serious discussion. It is a pity that they have been short-circuited, for the time being, by the “tongue in cheek” activities of satirists though, it is to be hoped, not for good.

Should religious believers seek any protection under the law from insult to their precious beliefs? People are protected from false statements being made about them either orally or in print. Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) also prohibits advocacy of religious hatred that leads to discrimination, hostility or violence against an individual or community. That is to say, the intention is to protect individuals and communities not articles or systems of belief as such. If a belief is attacked, surely its best defence is a reasoned response rather than violence or legal sanction?

The British in India sought to prevent the propagation of religious hatred as a means of promoting social harmony and maintaining public order. In certain contexts, this may be a legitimate aim but, if it is given legal form, it must be hedged about with safeguards for free expression. To put it another way, freedom of speech must be the presumption and any limitations would need to be justified on a case by case basis.

Any penalties for breaches of such limitations must be commensurate with the offence. One of the problems with laws of apostasy and of blaspheming in some Islamic nations is their draconian nature and lack of flexibility and judicial discretion. It cannot only be Muslims who are thus protected. In the Islamic world, the urgent need is to protect Christians, Yazidis, Baha’is and Ahmadis from the hatred engendered by textbooks, extremist sermons and pamphleteering.

The tragedies in Paris and Copenhagen should lead us to face these and other issues squarely, not to avoid them simply to maintain social cohesion with our societies or friendly relations with our trading partners. If they are not faced, domestic and international peace will be short-lived.

The post We Cannot Avoid The Battle Over Blasphemy appeared first on Standpoint.