BRITAIN: President Mary McAleese has said "consistency in showing respect for the human person is a key value and key test of the credentials of the rule of law".
In a keynote speech to a Law Society conference in London, the President stressed that while the rule of law was not a guarantee of security, "it is the guarantee of our freedom". And she said an independent legal profession performed probably "its noblest role", well or badly, "in articulating a determined adherence to the rule of law along with a determined adherence by the rule of law to basic and inviolable precepts of human rights".
Addressing a Law Society of England and Wales conference on "Lawyers' Independence: The rule of law and national security - striking the balance", the President said: "Good citizens in all our jurisdictions exhibit considerable patience, compliance and understanding when faced with the restrictions that enhanced security measures demand." They did so "not simply because they feel safer but because they know the rule of law carries responsibilities as well as rights".
But while "active citizenship" was "a profound responsibility that may from time to time mean living with reduced freedom", Mrs McAleese said: "Never, never with reduced humanity."
The President said that over the years of the Northern Ireland Troubles, lawyers on these islands had dealt on a daily basis with the issues being addressed yesterday. "Some of them paid a cruel personal price for maintaining their independence and for insisting that respect even for the most calumnified defendant's human and civil rights is a signature value of the very rule of law itself."
And she warned: "Absent clear-sighted and steady adherence to that value, the rule of law runs the danger of being hollowed out, becoming a husk with nothing inside to feed the individual or collective conscience with a healthy moral diet but enough contradictions to feed cynicism and alienation. Consistency in showing respect for the human person is a key value and key test of the credentials of the rule of law."
Mrs McAleese said London had its own harrowing stories to tell, and they had all directly experienced "the impact on our lives of changes in laws, practices and procedures driven by enhanced security consciousness and a desire to close down the space in which terrorists can easily operate".
Ireland, north and south, had faced such dilemmas and responded over the years in a variety of ways. Both had had historic experience of internment without trial, non-jury courts, emergency legislation with increased police powers and changes in the laws of evidence. "These things, justified by reference to the overarching concern for national security, have impinged on the rights of the individual."
The President went on: "I do not need to rehearse to this audience names like Annie Maguire, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six to point up the tragic consequences of that vulnerability for individuals and systems." The public was expected "to express fear and outrage in the teeth of terrorist violence" but "we also expect that our legal systems will respond in a more collected and considered way, with a distilled and robust wisdom of ages that safeguards individuals both from having their rights and very humanity obliterated by terrorists and from having those same rights and that same humanity sidelined by legal and political systems under tabloidised pressure or moral panics."
The President said the rule of law and national security were not opposing forces, nor were they mutually incompatible: "In fact the very opposite. What we can say with some confidence is that the rule of law is a potent weapon in the fight against terrorism. Combined with robust security measures they are the two pillars in a structured response to that evil."
As the rule of law stretched and strained under pressure to respond to terrorism, Mrs McAleese said, "the greatest victory for the terrorist would be if the rule of law were itself to collapse the carefully-constructed, hard-won rights and freedoms of the individual, which are the very seedbed of its legitimacy and the air that true justice, true freedom, breathes."