Alarm at UK Call on International Law

by Hannah K. Strange
UPI UK CorrespondentLondon (UPI)
Apr 05, 2006

Opposition politicians and human rights campaigners reacted with dismay Tuesday to British Defense Secretary John Reid's call for international laws, including the Geneva Conventions, to be redrawn to ensure states could counter global terrorism and undertake military interventions.

The threat of terrorism should not be used as justification for a watering-down of fundamental human rights, Liberal Democrats Shadow Defense Secretary Nick Harvey warned.

Any suggestion that Britain should endorse U.S. policies such as indefinite detention of terror suspects and extraordinary rendition must be "emphatically rejected," he said.

Reid's remarks were described as "dismaying" by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, while Conservative parliamentarian Andrew Tyrie said his suggestions "beggared belief."

Speaking at London's Royal United Services Institute Monday, the defense secretary said that the strategic landscape and the threats the world now faced were different to anything seen before, and that the legal framework governing conflict should therefore be reexamined.

The Geneva Conventions governing conduct in warfare were created over half a century ago when conflicts generally involved states pitted against each other, he said. They were not adequate to cope with the rise of non-state actors who obeyed "no rules whatsoever," were intent on carrying out large-scale atrocities against civilians and sought to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, he argued.

"The legal constraints upon us have to be set against an enemy that adheres to no constraints whatsoever," Reid added.

He addressed three key issues: the threat from terrorists, the possibility of states needing to use force to avert an imminent attack, and intervention on humanitarian grounds. In all such scenarios, Britain and other Western nations were hamstrung by existing laws, he suggested.

The "concept of imminence" -- the circumstances in which states can act preemptively against a perceived threat -- discussed by Reid was a central point of debate during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and has clear implications for any future military action against Iran.

The defense secretary declined to comment on whether he had been persuaded by the U.S. argument that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to enemy combatants detained in facilities such as Guantanamo Bay. Neither would he say whether Britain should endorse the U.S. practice of extraordinary rendition, the transfer of terror suspects to secret prisons where they risk being tortured. However it was not "sufficient just to say (Guantanamo) is wrong," he said.

His remarks prompted alarm among human rights groups and opposition politicians. The Liberal Democrats' Harvey said that there might be a case for reviewing the rules on humanitarian intervention and the applicability of certain legal instruments to the new global paradigm.

But, he warned: "After the disaster of Iraq, the idea that the doctrine of pre-emptive strike should be expanded, will be met with incredulity in the West, and with alarm in the ministries of Tehran."

Regarding the treatment of terror suspects, Harvey said that new threats must never be used to justify lower standards. "Compromising on established values and principles would not only be wrong, but would undermine crucial efforts to win hearts and minds."

Tyrie, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said it "beggared belief" that Reid had suggested international standards might be amended "and by implication, weakened."

"Before proposing to rewrite the rule book he should concentrate on making sure that the laws we do have are obeyed, both by the U.K. and the U.S.," he said.

Amyas Godfrey, a defense analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, argued that amendments to the Conventions could in fact strengthen them. For example: preventing the United States from "writing its own rules" on the treatment of enemy combatants.

The fact that the Geneva Conventions did not cover non-state actors had allowed the United States to "find a loophole, slip between the rules," he told United Press International.

"There's always a need to update the world in which you live and the rules by which we work," he said, acknowledging that there had been a significant change in the nature of conflict since the end of the Cold War.

The new enemies were principally non-state actors and would likely be for some time, he said, while it was even possible that defense operations would be franchised out to private companies in future. "There do need to be rules if the world is generally moving in that direction," he added.

But Godfrey told UPI there was a danger that politicians would change the rules to meet their needs, and that the public must be "vigilant."

Steve Crawshaw, the London director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that while there might be a case for updating the rules, the tone of Reid's speech suggested a desire to get rid of the restrictions that were deemed inconvenient.

It echoed the U.S. attacks on the entire rationale of the Geneva Conventions and the International Committee of the Red Cross following the September 11 atrocities, he told UPI.

The implication was: "We don't really like these rules, we think that after 9/11 the gloves came off," he said.

While in theory, amendments to the Conventions could close loopholes on the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, the fact was that the way the offshore camp had been constructed was specifically intended to circumvent existing laws, Crawshaw argued.

One therefore needed to be "extremely wary" of how any amendments would be handled, he said.

Crawshaw maintained that the Conventions remained "extremely applicable"; it was "deeply misleading" to suggest that they were somehow created in a "softer era," given that the key conventions were drafted in the wake of World War Two, which had seen ethnic cleansing, massacres, torture and internment on a massive scale.

While no one doubted the reality of the terror threat, the argument that it justified scrapping the rulebook was "dismaying," he said.

Source: United Press International

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