Collapse of rule of law 'would be a terrorist victory'

The greatest victory for terrorists would be if the rule of law were to collapse the freedoms of the individual, President Mary McAleese has said.

Speaking in London at the opening of a Law Society of England and Wales conference on lawyers' independence, Mrs McAleese urged lawyers to guard the rule of law, stating that its survival in each generation was "not guaranteed".

"Its dessicated fragments litter the vile first half of Europe's twentieth century and its absence or worse still its bogus impersonators in so many parts of the world threaten our global stability. Wherever it exists, it was hard-earned and is as precious as it is fragile," she said.

On terrorism, she noted the "harrowing" stories London itself had to tell. She said everyone had experienced the impact on their 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".

"Terrorists value their own cause so highly that the rights and suffering of the individual are of no emotional or moral consequence to them except as a means to their own ends. We are rightly aghast at their easy contempt for the men, women and children from whom they so cruelly take life, health and peace of mind," she said.

Mrs McAleese noted that over the years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, some lawyers, including Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane, had "paid a cruel personal price for maintaining their independence and for insisting that respect for even the most calumnified defendant's human and civil rights is a signature value of the very rule of law itself".

She said consistency in showing respect "for the human person", is a key value and a key test of the credentials of the rule of law.

Mrs McAleese said there would always be tensions between the freedom afforded to the individual and the need to protect that individual and all other citizens from the "caprice of the terrorist".

"But the rule of law is itself a hard-earned line of defence, a barricade, a buttress, against all kinds of caprice and not just that of the terrorist."

Citing Ireland's experience of internment without trial, juryless courts and emergency legislation to increase police powers, Mrs McAleese said these things, justified "by reference to the overarching concern for national security", had impinged on the rights of the individual.

She also cited the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six cases as examples of the "tragic consequences" when human rights were made vulnerable in the interests of security.

"We expect the public to express fear and outrage in the teeth of terrorist violence but we also expect that our legal and political 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.

"It is 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 that lawyers perform that essential duty.

"They are a crucial part of the checks and balances which keep our free, egalitarian, democracies precisely that, free egalitarian democracies, where trite stereotypes of race, religion, gender, etc, do not create the hazardous faultlines that make a two-tier society.

As the rule of law stretches and strains under pressure to respond to terrorism, 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 seed-bed of its legitimacy and the air that true justice, true freedom, breathes.

What if, in response to our horror at the contempt terrorists have for the individual, we as a society, as a political and legal system, become ourselves careless of that individual's rights?"