'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

209. Most people in Britain, I suspect, would be astonished at the amount of care, time and trouble that has been devoted to the question whether it will be safe for the aliens to be returned to their own countries. In each case the Secretary of State has issued a certificate under section 33 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Immigration Act 2001 that the aliens' removal from the United Kingdom would be conducive to the public good. The measured language of the statute scarcely matches the harm that they would wish to inflict upon our way of life, if they were at liberty to do so. Why hesitate, people may ask. Surely the sooner they are got rid of the better. On their own heads be it if their extremist views expose them to the risk of ill-treatment when they get home.
210. That however is not the way the rule of law works. The lesson of history is that depriving people of its protection because of their beliefs or behaviour, however obnoxious, leads to the disintegration of society. A democracy cannot survive in such an atmosphere, as events in Europe in the 1930s so powerfully demonstrated. It was to eradicate this evil that the European Convention on Human Rights, following the example of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, was prepared for the Governments of European countries to enter into. The most important word in this document appears in article 1, and it is repeated time and time again in the following articles. It is the word "everyone". The rights and fundamental freedoms that the Convention guarantees are not just for some people. They are for everyone. No one, however dangerous, however disgusting, however despicable, is excluded. Those who have no respect for the rule of law -- even those who would seek to destroy it -- are in the same position as everyone else.
211. The paradox that this system produces is that, from time to time, much time and effort has to be given to the protection of those who may seem to be the least deserving. Indeed it is just because their cases are so unattractive that the law must be especially vigilant to ensure that the standards to which everyone is entitled are adhered to. The rights that the aliens invoke in this case were designed to enshrine values that are essential components of any modern democratic society: the right not to be tortured or subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to liberty and the right to a fair trial. There is no room for discrimination here. Their protection must be given to everyone. It would be so easy, if it were otherwise, for minority groups of all kinds to be persecuted by the majority. We must not allow this to happen. Feelings of the kind that the aliens' beliefs and conduct give rise to must be resisted for however long it takes to ensure that they have this protection.

-- James Arthur David Hope (above right), the member of the British House of Lords who goes by the nom de juge of Lord Hope of Craighead, writing last Wednesday in RB (Algeria) (FC) v Sec’y of State for the Home Dep’t.

In the end, the Law Lords ruled in favor of the British government in this "case involving the proposed deportation of two Algerians, identified only as 'RB' and 'U', who the Home Secretary considers are a threat to national security." According to London's Independent, "Home Secretary Jacqui Smith [right] said she was delighted with the decision"; various human rights activists said they were not.

(hat tip for alerting us to this passage to our colleague Eugene R. Fidell)

On January 29

On this day in ...

... 1959 (50 year ago today), Disney released Sleeping Beauty, a full-length animated version of a very old fairy tale. It featured 2 very different women: Aurora, a careless wool-spinning princess, and the aptly named Maleficent (right), a snubbed sorceress who shapeshifts into a frightening dragon in a final effort to exact revenge. Subsequently released in theaters in more than 2 dozen countries -- most recently Russia, just 2 months ago -- the film remains a fantasy favorite a half-century later.

... 1982, Britain's House of Lords refused Canadian Indians permission to take their case, which sought greater entrenchment of their rights in Canada's new constitution.

On August 26

On this day in ...
... 1920, as the New York Times reported it:

The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o'clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.

(credit for photo of celebration this day in 1920)

... 1928 (80 years ago today), at about 8:50 at night, a tumbler filled with ice cream was placed on a table at the in the Wellmeadow Café in Glasgow, Scotland. Poured over it was 'some ginger beer from a brown opaque bottle bearing the name "D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley"' (left). May Donoghue took a sip, and only then "saw, floating out of the bottle, what she believed to be the partly decomposed remains of a snail." That sight and Donoghue's consequent illness touched off a legal battle that ended with the issuance of Donoghue v. Stevenson (1932), among the most famous judgments in English common law, by which the House of Lords established the duty of care that manufacturers of products owe to consumers.

On this day

On February 22, ...

... 1819, in Washington, D.C, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and his Spanish counterpart, Luis de Onís, signed the "Treaty of Amity, Settlement and Limits Between the United States of America, and His Catholic Majesty," a pact better known by its signers' names. In the Adams-Onís Treaty (right), which helped to define what is now the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States purchased Florida, renounced any claim to Texas, and agreed to a fixed western boundary for lands it had obtained from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Spain kept not only Texas, but western territories that today comprise much of the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

... 1774, in London, England, at the conclusion of 2-1/2 weeks of proceedings in the case captioned Donaldson v. Beckett but frequently known as The Question of Literary Property Case, the House of Lords "ended perpetual copyright, and established a limited copyright of fourteen years."

On January 30, ...

... 1972, in Derry, the 2d largest city in the North of Ireland, British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civil rights demonstrators. In the end 14 persons died, all but 1 on the day, and others were wounded. In the Associated Press photo at left, Father Edward Daly waves a white hankerchief as others carry a casualty out of the line of fire.
Among those present on that Bloody Sunday was a youth who'd celebrated his 18th birthday just weeks before. When the shooting started he crouched behind a concrete abutment, just yards away from some of those who died. On the anniversary of the event in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed by Peter D. O'Neill, that youth. The op-ed appeared on what happened to be the day of the much-vaunted elections in Iraq. O'Neill noted that after the shootings in Derry the local people had turned away from occupying troops, and, in words that proved sadly prophetic, wrote of his concern that the same thing might happen in Iraq:

It is the lesson of Bloody Sunday that, from Fallujah to Nasiriyah, from Mosul to Baghdad, we can expect violence every day that foreign troops remain on Iraq's soil. We can hope for no positive change without a full withdrawal of coalition forces -- a solution called for this week by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma -- so that Iraqis may take the lead in their own affairs. Based on Bush's second inaugural address, however, we can look only to four more years of unlearned and ineffective policy. And so we can muster no optimism about today's elections in Iraq.

... 1913, Britain's House of Lords rejected a bill that would have accorded to Ireland Home Rule, a modicum of self-government.

On October 30, ...

... 1997 (10 years ago today), Canada's Supreme Court held in Winnipeg Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v. G. (D.F.) that a lower court erred in ordering a woman to be placed against her will in a state-sponsored custodial drug treatment program, notwithstanding that she was addicted to glue sniffing, that she was 5 months pregnant with her 4th child, and that 2 of her previous children, born disabled, were wards of the state. At the base of the 7-2 ruling was the Supreme Court's conclusion that Canada's law did not recognize the unborn as rights-bearing individuals. University of Ottawa Law Professor Martha Jackman (left) represented the woman.

... 1957 (50 years ago today), the British government announced that it would open the House of Lords to women for the 1st time. Incumbent Lords' comments seem curious to an ear more accustomed to women in places of power. The BBC reported comments by Conservative Leader Lord Home thusly:

There were cheers when he said admitting women would simply be recognising the place they had commanded for themselves as a right in modern society. He raised a laugh when he added: 'Taking women into parliamentary embrace is, after all, only an extension of the normal privileges of a peer.'

The Liberals' Lord Samuel then took his own turn at gender-charged metaphor:

'House of Lords reform has been rather like a slow motion film of a prima ballerina, not marked by agility or grace, but by languid exhibition and elephantine deliberations.'

Human rights law's arm gets a bit longer

Do laws that constrain state agents on state territory also apply abroad?
The question's occupied U.S. courts for half a century, as our colleague Kal Raustiala recently wrote, and it lurks beneath the surface of much of the post-9/11 executive detention litigation.
The House of Lords weighed in yesterday in Al-Skeini and others v. Secretary of State for Defence, a case challenging treatment by British troops of Iraqi civilians detained in Iraq. The Law Lords ruled that the Human Rights Act, adopted in 1998 to give internal effect to Europe's Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, has some, but not full, extraterritorial reach. The Lords relied most heavily on Banković v. Belgium, in which survivors of an air attack on Serbia applied to the European Court of Human Rights for redress against states that adhered both to the European Convention and the NATO treaty. The states denied the incident implicated their duty to guarantee rights "to everyone within their jurisdiction," as I've written:

According to "‘the ordinary and well-established meaning ... in public international law,’" states argued, jurisdiction "‘involves the assertion or exercise of legal authority, actual or purported, over persons owing some form of allegiance to the State or who have been brought within that State’s control,’" and "‘generally entails some form of structured relationship normally existing over a period of time.’" The Court agreed that Convention obligations ordinarily apply only within a member state’s territory; therefore, it rejected the application. Yet it reaffirmed its authority in exceptional cases to review a state’s exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Such exceptions might occur when a state, "through the effective control of the relevant territory and its inhabitants abroad as a consequence of a military occupation or through the consent, invitation or acquiescence of the Government of that territory, exercises all or some of the public powers normally to be exercised by that government," the Court wrote, or when a state acts outside its territory pursuant to international law. It indicated that judicial review would be particularly appropriate when necessary to avoid stranding applicants in a "vacuum in human rights’ protection."

Based on similar reasoning the Law Lords extended Human Rights Act protections to 1, but not all 6, of the Iraqi claimants; lawyers in the latter cases say they'll now press their claims before the Strasbourg Court.