The Holocaust ensured the cry Nie Wieder - never again - would be heard throughout Europe for the rest of the 20th century after the horrors of the second World War death camps. The rhetoric of Cold War European leaders was filled with the idea that their mission was to ensure that such gross human rights abuses never occurred again in Europe. The same rhetoric was employed by the founders and supporters of the European Union, and by those in Europe who later welcomed the fall of eastern European communism. Each development in European geopolitics was hailed as a further step towards the ideal of Nie Wieder.
The Omarska camp in Bosnia has become the symbol of the hollowness of the rhetoric as the century draws to a close. Other Yugoslav names - Srebrenica, Vukovar, Trnopolje - have also become by-words for human rights abuses, torture and mass murder in Europe, 50 years after Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen had the same effect on earlier generations.
Of course the scale of killing is vastly different. But the brutality employed by the torturers and killers of former Yugoslavia can surely not have been excelled in the past. The evidence emerging at the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague is of truly unspeakable behaviour. European states have attempted to place themselves on a high moral ground in relation to human rights abuses. . That Europe deserves to be on that high moral ground is questionable. In its bulletin for the first half of 1998, Amnesty International listed 36 European states about whose human rights records it had concerns. The 36 included the five central Asian Republics Kazakhstan, Krygystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - all members of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) but also most of the EU member states and those who lecture other parts of the world on human rights.
The concerns ranged from suspicious deaths to ill-treatment of suspects in custody, prison conditions, the death penalty and the treatment of conscientious objectors to military service and prisoners of conscience.
The reality in many European states has been that the first principle to be jettisoned in cases of political difficulty has been that of respect for human rights. During the Cold War years, all Eastern European states ignored international human rights norms, imposing varying degrees of political repression to keep their rulers in power.
Outside the communist bloc, states such as Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey declined to take democracy seriously until recently. The treatment of gypsies throughout Europe - from Romania to West Dublin - has been a cause of constant concern to human rights activists for decades. In Britain and Ireland, 30 years of opposition to paramilitary organisations has been accompanied by regular and persistent complaints about the abuse of detainees, the rules of evidence in non-jury trials, extra-judicial killings and of course the summary violent behaviour, injury and death meted out by the paramilitaries themselves.
European complicity in human rights abuses does not stop at European borders. Torturers and murderous regimes in other continents have been armed and equipped by many European states. European arms manufacturers sell firearms, explosives and landmines to many repressive governments. Despite the widespread abuses of human rights on the continent, Europe has built a solid structure to defend human rights. The European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg is a Council of Europe institution set up to ensure adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Twenty-three new states have signed up to the Convention since 1990. Many of these are former communist states, and there is now a backlog of some 7,000 cases. Close to 5,000 new cases were added to the backlog this year alone. There can be a wait for up to six years for cases to be completed at the moment. Among its judgments were those in the Norris case against the prohibition on homosexual acts, the Airey case establishing the right to free legal aid and the judgment in the Open Line Counselling case allowing abortion information. In the early 1970s the court ruled in favour of a case taken by Ireland against Britain concerning the ill-treatment of internees in The Maze prison, then known as Long Kesh. The court also ruled against Britain in relation to the killings of three IRA members in Gibraltar.
The volume of cases pending and the fact that they come from almost all European states makes the point that while Europe often lectures others concerning their human rights records, it still cannot say with confidence: Nie Wieder.