• Governments should pay attention to what international inspectors say (a recommendation made already by the Butler commission);

• A government may calculate its engaging in armed intervention but it is hard to foresee how things may develop. (Cf. today Iran);

• Governments should take the UN Charter legal restrictions on the use of force seriously. While the UK did not seek to claim that preventive war was permissible, its justification for joining the armed intervention was thin and unpersuasive. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, did advise that the UK could rest its case on it, in a secret memo (later leaked) he noted that it might not have been accepted by an international tribunal.

But anyway, the witnesses have seen the very documents on which they will be questioned but the public won’t.

Whose side is the Inquiry on?

Follow the Inquiry at Iraq Inquiry Digest.

Tim McGarry at the Slugger Awards

Tonight in Belfast, we’re running the second in what I hope will become the annual ‘Slugger Awards‘.

These awards – previewed here on the Amnesty blog – are something of a departure for political weblogs. It would be fair to say that politicians are – for the most part – less than thrilled by the way that blogs have transformed politics.

The Slugger Awards are something of an attempt to redress the balance. Slugger is unusually visible in Northern Ireland’s politics. It has over 34,000 unique visitors per month and Stratagem/ComRes polling shows that 96% of NI Assembly Members read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Local Democracy. Please leave any comments there.

What if you were walking home one day and everything stopped, as if on pause? The cars ground to a halt where they were in the road, people stopped walking mid-stride, mid-nose-scratch; birds froze in the sky and the planets and sub-atomic particles stopped orbiting? What if all change ceased suddenly and stayed that way for an entire day or a whole year throughout the universe?

Is it possible?

As one who has a small amount of legal knowledge on this particular topic, I often shudder to the degree of spilling my morning tea, when reading things in the media about the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Perhaps the tabloid press can be forgiven for making up such trumpery, but when more respected news publications confuse the facts, this is of grave concern. Though, still one might forgive the publics false conception on the ECHR with such 'codswallop' floating around in the septic tank of the British media. However, it is less easy to be so gracious to David Cameron's Conservative party who often speak about the ECHR with as much legal accuracy as you might expect from a mentally retarded baboon.

Now the question is; is this due to them actually not understanding the ECHR and the judgments coming from Strasbourg or is are they deliberately twisting it to fit their inherent allergy to all things European?

First, I will note that I come to no conclusion on the above question. Yet, I will highlight what I mean by listing a few (not exclusive by any means) myths on the ECHR. I will also note that our current government are not immune from this contagious disease and have been recently more encouraged to make regrettable comments about the ECHR, often when cases go against them.

General Media Myths

It didn't get even to court

Often we will see headlines such as 'Human Right to have Porn in Prison'. Completely untrue, like 90% of all attempted cases it was thrown out at a very early stage. Just because one madmen brings a case doesn't mean that it was decided in his favour or even that it got to court. But you wouldn't get that from reading about it certain parts of the press.

They didn't say that!

To take a recent example. You might have read that you can no longer have a crucifix in a classroom. UNTRUE!! (Sorry, my anger got the better of me). Briefly: Italy signed up to the idea of religious pluralism as protected in ECHR. It was law that every classroom had to have a crucifix. Italy argued that a crucifix is not religious it is a national symbol. Court said yes it is religious and that it can not be law to have it in every classroom. Note: it is not law to have one in every classroom in Ireland or in the UK so we are completely unaffected. If you are in a Catholic school by all means have a crucifix.

It's not the EU!

Please note: The ECHR is not any thing to do with the EU. The ECHR predates the EC and has nearly twice as many members, including Turkey and Russia. It is a part of the Council of Europe.

Some Conservative induced myths

You can't have photos of Criminals.

Yes you can. Simple. Art 8 would prevent you putting up a poster of someone willy-nilly but if you can show that you are doing it in order to protect against crime it is unlikely that Strasbourg would care.

A Bill of Rights would be just as good

What criteria do you have to pass to have Human Rights? You have to be human. Anybody on European Soil who is Human has rights protected by the ECHR. British Rights-are not, and can not be Human Rights. If you wouldn't loss any rights if we pulled out of the ECHR and enacted a British Bill of Rights, then why do it. Could we not simply do what most countries do and have a complementary Bill of Rights running along side the ECHR?