Lawyers must not allow the human rights ideal with its emphasis on justice and due process to be sacrificed in the global war on terror espoused by US president George Bush and his allies, a leading human rights lawyer has warned.
Prof Conor Gearty, who is Rausing director of the Centre for Human Rights at the London School of Economics, was speaking at the opening of the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights at the faculty of law at University College Cork.
He said the past two decades had seen the term "terrorism" evolve from a description of a kind of violence to a morally loaded condemnation of the actions of subversive groups regardless of the contexts of their actions.
The espousing of the global war on terrorism by President Bush had led to a suffocation of the criminal justice model with its emphasis on due processes, fair procedures, settled rules and carefully calibrated international co-operation against defined criminal mischiefs.
Prof Gearty said UK law had certainly "drifted in this direction", while in the US, the Patriot Act had similarly empowered the authorities to act in "an undeniably draconian way".
"The language of terrorism provides the justification for these egregious breaches of the right to privacy . . . they could not have arisen if we had stuck to the criminal model," said Prof Gearty.
UCC president Prof Michael Murphy welcomed the opening of the centre which, he said, would facilitate the exploration of ideas in partnership with international agencies.