Hail the Philosopher Kings!

Today, the main news story in the UK is the law lords ruling that the goverment is not allowed to use evidence that may have been extracted under torture against terror suspects. Since the law lords represent the highest legal authority in the land the government has do choice but no accept their judgment (governments are not able to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights).

I am interested in human rights (HR), including the presentation of HR issues in the media and the attitude of the public towards them. I have campaigned on behalf of Amnesty International in both a personal and professional capacity over the last five years, this has included speaking to people face-to-face on the street about the work of Amnesty and HR issues in general, organising public events to promote the work of Amnesty, monitoring the coverage of HR issues in the local and national press and lobbying my local politician on behalf of Amnesty.

Amnesty's remit is fairly simple. Essentially it boils down to this: On 1oth December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This is a list of thirty articles which proclaim, in clear and simple terms, the rights of every single person on earth. Amnesty aims to promote an awareness of these articles throughout the global populace and to ensure that all world governments are abiding by them, taking action against governments whenever necessary.

Taken individually these articles can be seen as uncontroversial. Who but the most ardent fascists could argue against Article 1 for example? That 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights' is seen, certainly in our society as a truism in the literal sense and the foundation for liberal democracy. There is simply no coherent logical argument against this.

While campaigning I would show these articles to people by way of explaining the work of Amnesty. For many it was the first time they had seen the document (The UDHR has been famously referred to as 'the world's best kept secret'). Noone who I spoke to had an instinctive objection to any of the articles, indeed most expressed how natural and reasonable they sounded.

The complications arise when the articles are taken together as a package and the frictions between them occur. Consider Article 17 ('Everyone has the right to own property') Vs Article 25 ('Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living, including housing'). In Monsterland, a small state with a population of only a hundred yet still bound by the UDHR, all the homes are owned by one person, Shion. Since Shion bought the houses legally (using the gold he recovered from the Meka Dragon, for those of you interested) he is free to do with them as he pleases, including turfing out the current occupants. Making a country homeless is, of course a violation of Article 25 but taking Shion's property from him is a violation of Article 17. What is to be done? Well, I can happily inform the concerned reader that Monsterland has developed a complex system of what amounts to squatter's rights and the restriction of monopolies on property. Such compromises can be viewed as legal buffers between the articles and, as such, are give their legitimacy by the the more ambiguous Article 29 - 'Everyone has duties to the community'; what I call the 'safety valve article'.

Article 29 can be summed up as follows: Everyone has rights but, where the rights of one person potentially interfere with those of another, it is the job of law to 'limit' these rights with a view to maintaining a stable and secure society. The nature and form of these laws can be seen to be, to a certain extent, culturally relative and, as such, this article can be seen as the basis for global legal variance. As way of example, consider Article 19 -'Freedom of expression' Vs Article 12 - 'Noone should be subjected to...attacks upon his honour and reputation' and the libel laws this conflict precipitates. Even in countries as legally similar at the US and UK the nature of these libel law is vastly different.

However, it is also this article that provides the legal cover for governments to legitimize more draconian laws. The Patriot Act in the US, for example, could be viewed as a reinterpretation of the battle lines between Article 3 - 'Everyone has the right to life' Vs Article 12 'The right to privacy' or, to put another way, 'to what extent can you justify reading people's private emails under the pretext that you making sure they aren't talking plotting terrorist activities?'

To bring it back to the subject in hand, the debate presupposed by the media in the coverage of the UK government's ambition to legitimize the use of evidence of the use of torture against terrorist subjects was of the 'Article 3 Vs Article 5 (The right not to be tortured) variety'. To what extent can be use such dubious evidence be used with a view to preventing innocent people being murdered in a 7/7 type attack? This is highlighted by the fact that when politicians such as Charles Clarke are accused of undermining human rights they always coming back with
the 'what about about the rights of those who have died?' line.

The effect of framing the debate in this way is that, if taken to a vote, I believe the British public would be in favour of using evidence used under torture. In this respect, the ruling could be viewed as an undemocratic one made by an unrepresentative institution. It was not without a sense of irony that many people who would ordinarily question the legitimacy of the lords found themselves welcoming today's ruling.

For me, this was never the debate. Torture is not just abhorrent, it is illogical. Under extreme duress people will confess to anything. The things they say in these circumstances not only have no legitimacy, they have no reliability and are, therefore, useless for the purposes of evidence gathering. This fact has been demonstrated consistently by the false testimonies of innocent parties seeking to escape from cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments. If put to the public in these terms, I think there would be a consensus in favour of the lords' verdict.

So, it returning their ruling, it was not just with reference to universal human rights that the lords justified their opinions but also this fundamental flaw inherent in the practice of torture. Today was then not just a good day for humanity, but also a good one for rational thought.