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Nov. 29th, 2003 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanI was going to write a long post about the recent F.A.Mann lecture given by Lord Steyn in the Old Hall here, just across the way, the other day. I had hoped to be there, but I was too busy, something which irritated me enormously when I heard about it afterwards.
Sadly the British Institute of Comparative Law website, where a formalised version of the paper is apparently available, seems to be down, and although I have read a version I don't have it on me, so I can't quote. For Americans and others not familiar with the complexities of the higher courts here, Lord Steyn is one of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and can therefore reasonably be described as the equivalent, under our current constitutional arrangements, of a US Supreme Court Justice. In this fairly high profile speech he unleashed a withering attack on both the US Administration and the judiciary (though he conceded the Supremes had made a small step in the right direction recently) on the situation at Guantanamo Bay.
Steyn has always been noted as one of the Law Lords who concentrates most on what are known as "human rights" issues, for want of a more accurate and elegant term. Although not quite as mind-bogglingly brilliant as Lord Hoffman (but then, few mortals are, and Lord Hoffman knows this only too well, despite his fuckup in Re: Pinochet) Steyn, like most of the Law Lords, is able to unite argument from basic principle with detailed and academic argument from authority in elegant and devastating speeches, and it seems that this was no exception. Describing the proposed tribunals he said:
"The term 'kangaroo court' springs to mind. It derives from the jumps of the kangaroo, and conveys the idea of a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice."
(Along the way, incidentally, he made sideswipes at what he called the "destruction of the international legal order" that occurred in the last twelve months, implicitly criticised Kissinger for semi-defending Pinochet's record, and called on the government to "make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay", a political statement of the kind that (quite rightly) is almost never made by Her Majesty's Judiciary.)
I can add only one point to his diatribe, and it's not an original one, indeed it has been made time and time again over the last few hundred years in different situations and in different ways. If the whole point of this exercise is not to defend precisely the kind of values perhaps most significantly represented by the principle of fair trial and the need for the prosecution to prove their case to a high standard before an independent tribunal in criminal matters, what is it? If it is, how can the defence of those principles require their abandonment?
Hmm. It seems I have written an atypically long post on this after all.
Sadly the British Institute of Comparative Law website, where a formalised version of the paper is apparently available, seems to be down, and although I have read a version I don't have it on me, so I can't quote. For Americans and others not familiar with the complexities of the higher courts here, Lord Steyn is one of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and can therefore reasonably be described as the equivalent, under our current constitutional arrangements, of a US Supreme Court Justice. In this fairly high profile speech he unleashed a withering attack on both the US Administration and the judiciary (though he conceded the Supremes had made a small step in the right direction recently) on the situation at Guantanamo Bay.
Steyn has always been noted as one of the Law Lords who concentrates most on what are known as "human rights" issues, for want of a more accurate and elegant term. Although not quite as mind-bogglingly brilliant as Lord Hoffman (but then, few mortals are, and Lord Hoffman knows this only too well, despite his fuckup in Re: Pinochet) Steyn, like most of the Law Lords, is able to unite argument from basic principle with detailed and academic argument from authority in elegant and devastating speeches, and it seems that this was no exception. Describing the proposed tribunals he said:
"The term 'kangaroo court' springs to mind. It derives from the jumps of the kangaroo, and conveys the idea of a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice."
(Along the way, incidentally, he made sideswipes at what he called the "destruction of the international legal order" that occurred in the last twelve months, implicitly criticised Kissinger for semi-defending Pinochet's record, and called on the government to "make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay", a political statement of the kind that (quite rightly) is almost never made by Her Majesty's Judiciary.)
I can add only one point to his diatribe, and it's not an original one, indeed it has been made time and time again over the last few hundred years in different situations and in different ways. If the whole point of this exercise is not to defend precisely the kind of values perhaps most significantly represented by the principle of fair trial and the need for the prosecution to prove their case to a high standard before an independent tribunal in criminal matters, what is it? If it is, how can the defence of those principles require their abandonment?
Hmm. It seems I have written an atypically long post on this after all.
