Judiciary must guard long-held principles in war on terrorism, UN says

In the war against terrorism, the judiciary should not yield its long-accepted principles of safeguarding human rights to an executive using secrets to achieve unknown ends, the United Nations human rights chief said today.

Addressing the International Commission of Jurists in Berlin, Germany, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said, "Put bluntly, the judiciary should not surrender its sober, long-term, principled analysis of issues to a call by the executive for extraordinary measures grounded in information that cannot be shared, to achieve results that cannot be measured."

The law that is capable of delivering justice and providing remedies for grievances is what must guide societies, not the laws like those of formerly apartheid South Africa "that regulated oppression and led to a horrific denial of dignity," she said.

In the long term, a commitment to human rights and the rule of law will be a key to success in countering terrorism, rather than an impediment, she said.

Although defining terrorism remains a problem, the December 2003 judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in Prosecutor vs. Galiæ was a landmark. It added to the terrorist acts based on traditional war crimes against the civilian population some new offences drawn from the Financing of Terror Convention, Ms Arbour said.

These included terror-inducing "acts of violence directed against the civilian population or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities causing death or serious injury to body or health within the civilian population," she said.

Reviewing several relevant cases decided by courts around the world since the 11 September 2001 attack on the United States, Ms. Arbour said, "Terrorism casts a terrible, dark shadow over our world today."

Nonetheless, "it is incumbent on all of us to ensure that the prevention of terrorism is not pursued with a single-minded zeal that leads us to give up our freedom in exchange for our security," she said.