Naughty Americans

British people really do love to have a good whinge about America. I was thinking about this today while listening to a radio debate between Shami Chakrabarti, leader of the pro-civil-liberties lobby group Liberty, and an American legal expert, over the question of rendition of suspects. Apparently in a recent case before the Supreme Court, it has been ruled that even if a criminal suspect has been brought to the US illegally from another country (i. e., outside the ordinary extradition procedures), then setting aside the question of the legality of the seizure or otherwise, they can be tried before a US court.

Needless to say, Chakrabarti was vigorously opposed to this decision. She used the hoary old liberal chestnut that, in a democratic society, the rule of law is vitally important and if compromised by the government for any reason in any small manner, then tyranny and dictatorship follow. Most of the people who phoned in afterwards agreed with her. They saw it as yet another example of America riding roughshod over freedom and liberty, bullying the rest of the world, and ignoring international law. (They also mostly completely misinterpreted the whole thing to mean, 'George Bush is now going to go around kidnapping whoever he likes and having them stand trial!' as you would expect.)

As is often the case, I always want to ask Chakrabarti-ist liberals what they would have liked the alternative to have been in a case like that of Eichmann, who as you probably know was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in 1960 and taken to Israel to face trial. In that case, Israel technically violated a long-established customary rule of international law - that of State sovereignty - but very few people would argue that it wasn't justified. Eichmann was not the type of man the world could continue to allow to escape justice, and even if Israel should technically not have kidnapped him, the fact remained that he ought to have been tried - and would not if he had been allowed to remain in Argentina.

I would submit that 'the rule of law' is often bandied about by liberals as the cornerstone of society, but that the law is in the end only a means by which justice is served. In Eichmann's case justice demanded that a certain law be broken, and if on occasion the US judiciary is faced with the decision of whether or not to try a dangerous criminal based on a possible illegality in his or her seizure, I would applaud its decision to go ahead with a trial.

British readers will remember Ronny Biggs, a man involved in one of the most famous crimes in post-war Britain - The Great Train Robbery. Biggs was responsible for the theft of a huge amount of money and was at the very least an accomplice to murder, but because he managed to flee to Brazil he never faced the punishment that he should have. He lived free to a ripe old age. I call that madness - but what is madder still is that, if Ms. Chakrabarti had her way, if Biggs had somehow ended up back in the UK circa 1970 without being properly extradited, it would have been wrong to try him. That is liberty at the expense of common sense.

In any case, I sincerely doubt that any court in any country in the world would act in a different way to the US Supreme Court in this matter, so the rest of us can hardly point the finger at Washington. People do, though - because nothing beats a good Thursday lunchtime grip about evil old Uncle Sam.

Freedom of Blah (II)

I have a hard time getting worked up about civil liberties. They're the talk of the town at the moment in British public life, mainly because of two things: the government is planning to issue ID cards to all legal UK residents; and there are calls for extending the time limit for detention of terror suspects without charge from 28 days to 56.

What's wrong with me? On the face of it, these are the exact things that somebody with my political views and background should be campaigning stridently against. But I just can't, no matter how hard I try, see what the fuss is all about.

I think it all stems from the peculiar way that human rights in the West are conceptualised. In the visions of Locke, Rousseau, Paine and Hobbes that our societies are based on, the State is seen as the great danger in society - the monolithic institution that will crush individual autonomy and deny our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This leads to a vision of 'human rights' as fundamentally about protecting individual liberties - especially freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and the right to be innocent until proven guilty.

In Japan, people just don't have that view about human rights. There, rights are about the good of the community - they are conceptualised as the framework by which society's safety is ensured. In other words, the majority of people have the right not to be put in danger from terrorists, to be the victims of crime, or to be denied work because of illegal immigrants, and it is worth sacrificing the individual liberties of terrorism suspects or other criminals in order to protect those rights. Things like ID cards and detention for 28 days without charge are staples of the Japanese legal system, because society as a whole places more importance on the rights of the majority to live in safety than on the rights of the minority (criminals, terrorists and illegal immigrants) to have their civil liberties protected.

During my time in Japan I, like all legal foreign residents, had to carry around an ID card and inform the government about my place of residence. At no point did I find it irksome, and I certainly didn't view it as an infringement of my rights. I barely gave it any thought, in fact. That's just the way Japan has chosen to run its affairs - individual freedoms are less well protected by law in that country, but the trade-off is that it's a very safe and secure place. I don't think the Japanese have the balance perfectly right, but as it stands it's better than the one that pertains in the UK, the US or France - unless of course you plan to commit crimes or plan terror attacks.

I, for one, won't be singing and dancing on the rooftops if I have to carry around an ID card in Britain. But at the same time I hardly see it as a step towards coming under the thumb of Big Brother as many of my compatriots do. In any case if that's what people were really worried about they'd be campaigning against the CCTV camera systems that are slowly kneedling their way into every corner of urban Britain - but oddly, they rarely do.

Equality and Proportionality

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I've been watching Save Planet Earth on the BBC these last couple of nights. It's nice to get the chance to see intelligent programming about the environment that doesn't mention carbon footprints and emission trading (yawn). Instead, the series has focused on plain, old-fashioned conservation: protecting endangered species from disappearing.

It has concentrated to a large extent on what is, to me, the key issue regarding conversation - namely the importance of balancing the progress of the developing world with the safety of animal populations in those areas. The programmes have been very careful to highlight the importance of incorporating the needs and desires of local people into conservation efforts; hence tonight's episode (on the Ethiopian Wolf) devoted some minutes to investigating how environmentalists in Southern Ethiopia concentrate much of their efforts on educating people in sustainable farming and development.

I'm all for supporting such projects, but whenever I hear about them I'm always reminded of the apparently inescapable hypocrisy of the West - the different standards we set for developing countries and ourselves. We've seen it most recently from the attitude towards China's rising carbon emissions; people worry and fret that "two coal power stations open in China every week" - the implication being that China is the real threat regarding climate change and the rest of us need not bother doing anything about it - forgetting that, per capita, Western countries produce vastly more Carbon than China. But we also see it in the conservation movement. Western countries have been singularly poor at conserving their animal populations - wolves, bears and wild boar were hunted to extinction over a few hundred years in Britain, for example - and yet we're the keenest to force other people in the world to inhibit their own development in order to protect other animal species.

I'm sure that it can be argued that we, in the West, having effectively destroyed our countries as natural "wilderness" environments, are now in a good position to persuade people in the developing world not to make the same mistakes that we have. But I'm not so sure. That position, I think, would require a genuine recalcitrance on our part which doesn't actually seem to be there. (It might be demonstrated by a greater willingness to reopen areas to wilderness.) As it stands, our position is essentially that people in developing countries should make sacrifices for the environment that we never made during our development, and which we are still largely unwilling to make. Do as we say, in other words, not as we do. I hardly need point out how inadequate that is.

It reminds me of a statement I read recently made by a Chinese representative to the Human Rights Committee in 1997, in defence of his country's human rights record. "The developed Western countries," he said, "have the unshirkable responsibility for the human rights problems the world faces today...how come 1.3 billion people are living in poverty? Does it have nothing to do with the aggression, exploitation and plundering by the colonialists of the past? Isn't it the consequence of the irrational international economic order established by the developed countries?" One is tempted to note that much the same argument can be applied to environmental issues: the West is largely responsible for the damage that humans have done to the natural world, and yet we are mostly happy to foist future responsibility, and blame for current problems, onto the Third World. Why, when we abused our own environments during our industrial development, do we expect other countries to do the opposite?

That doesn't mean that efforts don't need to be made on the part of developing countries to protect their natural places (nor to protect the human rights of their citizens); it just means that those efforts should be concurrent with equal and proportionate efforts on our part, too. Otherwise our hand-wringing and moralising is worse than meaningless.