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Journalism of Courage
Last week Tony Blair hinted that he is prepared to confront the judges to get new anti-terrorism laws on to the statute book this autumn. Yesterday Michael Howard characteristically went further, warning that “aggressive judicial activism” is preventing parliament from doing its job of passing new laws to protect the public from the kind of threats that killed so many Londoners on July 7. Between them, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are clearly signalling a confrontation with the judiciary over individual rights in the terrorist age…
As July 7 showed, terrorism against innocent citizens is a modern reality. Politicians are not merely entitled to respond strongly; they also have an obligation to do so. But politicians should neither exaggerate nor seek to bully the courts out of doing their job. In our politico-media culture, politicians rarely suffer for talking tough. But the courts have a fixed and proper role to play in a democracy…
Politicians are currently fond of mocking Lord Hoffman’s comment in the Belmarsh judgment — in which the law lords overturned an important part of Britain’s post 9/11 anti-terror laws — to the effect that it is those laws rather than terrorism itself that constitutes the greater threat to the nation… The intention, obviously enough, is to show that silly old out-of-touch judges do not live in the real world where people on tube trains get blown to smithereens merely because they live, in the words of one alleged Islamo-terrorist this week, in the “vital organ of the minions of the devil”.
Anyone who has actually read the Belmarsh judgment, as opposed merely to Lord Hoffman’s part of it, will know that what the court said in December 2004 was much more measured and far more authoritative than this implies.
Excerpted from an editorial in ‘The Guardian’, August 11
