CONFERENCE OF ADVOCATES AND BARRISTERS:FORMER MINISTER for justice Michael McDowell SC has criticised what he called the "phoney war on terror", saying it "should not be used to justify counterterrorism".
Speaking in Dublin at the World Conference of Advocates and Barristers, which continues in Belfast today, Mr McDowell said we should never confuse the fight against terror with counterterrorism.
“As an article of faith we should uphold the rule of law. Is the rule of law to be defended anywhere by waterboarding or torture in Abu Ghraib?”
He said when, as minister for justice, he was looking at European legislation relating to the fight against terrorism, he was concerned at the lack of an adequate definition.
It involved the use of violence, murder, sexual violence, destruction of infrastructure or the environment, inflicted on the general population with the intention of promoting a political objective.
“What distinguishes it from resistance is the intent to injure, or create fear of injury in, the general population,” he said. “This applies equally to state and non-state terrorism, and also to state terrorism by proxy.”
He said there was a huge problem with the term the “war on terror”. “At best, it is counterproductive, and at worst it is a fig leaf for counterterrorism,” he said. He warned against lawyers lending legitimacy to methods of fighting terrorism that amounted to counterterrorism.
Introducing Mr McDowell, Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman described him as a man who introduced many reforms “both with and without inverted commas” in the legal system.
He said the encroachment of the traditional view of the law was not coming from the fight against terrorism but against “ordinary criminals”.
Recalling earlier references to Rosemary Nelson and Michael Finucane, he asked: “Who is a ‘human rights lawyer’? It’s a criminal lawyer whom you have to praise.”
He said that criminal lawyers were regarded with contempt. “No one seems to be called a human rights lawyer when they’re alive. Being murdered seems a high price to have to pay to join those ranks.”
Conor Gearty, director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights in the London School of Economics, said he saw the emergence of three types of lawyers since the launch of the so-called war on terror: what he called “outlaw lawyers” who acted as midwives to state lawlessness; “emergency lawyers”, who argued that human rights should not be set aside and “true lawyers” who said, “we do what we always do”.
He said he would like to see the equivalent of “professional war crimes” to be invoked against “outlaw lawyers”, who were assisted by liberal scholars who said that the “war on terror” was “defending our civilisation”.
“If Iraq had worked, they would have succeeded,” he said. “It is disturbing to think that we owe it to the rebels in Iraq that they didn’t.”
Colm Ó Cinnéide, who taught law in University College London, told the conference that law had exercised a dampening effect on some of the excesses of the “fight against terror”.