Liberty In The Decade of Extraordinary Rendition

Liberty in the decade of extraordinary rendition


'The US developed its own definition of torture and began transporting captives to ghost prisons and a little-known military base in Cuba'

Afua Hirsch
The Guardian, UK
Saturday 17 October 2009




A prisoner in an outdoor solitary confinement cage talks with a military policeman at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Photograph: John Moore/AP

With spectacular irony, fundamental rights and freedoms around the world were violated over the decade almost as rapidly as new mechanisms to protect them were being assembled. In the UK, less than a year after New Labour's Human Rights Act promised to protect civil liberties in 2000, new counterterrorism laws began eroding them. Indefinite detention without trial, control orders, asset-freezing and secret court hearings became part of a new legal order – a 2004 House of Lords judgment declared, "The real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

Military invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan made the problem global, with questions about the Iraq war's legality soon overshadowed. Photos of Lynndie England and other US military personnel torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004 took public opinion to a new low; British forces, too, became embroiled in allegations of mistreatment. Osama bin Laden remained elusive, but hundreds of other terrorist suspects did not. As "extraordinary rendition" entered the popular vocabulary, the US stood accused of kidnapping men as young as 15 and rendering them to countries where interrogation techniques ranged from extracting fingernails to electrocution.

The US developed its own definition of torture and began transporting captives to ghost prisons and a little-known military base in Cuba. Guantánamo Bay came to symbolise the injustice of the Bush era as hundreds were detained without prisoner-of-war or civilian protection as the US unilaterally redefined its legal obligations. Undoing the ensuing damage proved harder than many imagined – Obama's pledge to restore the rule of law and close Guantánamo was frustrated by the question of what to do with its inmates. In Britain, the return of Binyam Mohamed this year brought new insight into conditions at the camp and evidence of British complicity in torture.

Elections in Iraq in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2009 revealed that steps towards democracy would be taken incrementally, as elsewhere the struggle for democracy pursued a bloody path. The sight of crimson-clad monks bleeding on the streets among thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Burma's "saffron revolution" in 2007 shocked the world, while for many the continuing house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi represented the oppressive persistence of despotic regimes. In Africa, enduring areas of conflict and totalitarian rule – and disappointment at the failure of the new African Union to criticise its own statesmen – obscured progress elsewhere. Ghana, Mozambique and Rwanda continued to achieve peaceful transitions of power and growth, while the prospect of oil across West Africa brought cautious hope.

In 2006, the arrest of former Liberian president Charles Taylor offered unprecedented accountability, and his ongoing trial for alleged war crimes was followed by the first attempt to bring to trial an incumbent head of state, as the international criminal court issued a warrant for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir. Potentially a milestone for international justice, the difficulty of arresting al-Bashir served as a reminder that legal decisions require political will to enforce them.

Europe remained home to numerous violations of international human rights, not least in freedom of expression, with Russia and Turkey accused of an astonishing number of repressive acts. The European Court of Human Rights regressed in its attitude towards balancing the rights of free speech and privacy, while in the UK newspapers argued they were being crippled by exponential libel costs and celebrities invoking privacy rights. Privacy was less precious for non-celebrities as the growth in DNA databases continued apace, with the UK retaining DNA from more people than any other country – other states looked on as British plans suffered a setback in 2008 when a legal challenge ruled that this violated fundamental rights. Nor did other aspects of Britain's agenda escape the spotlight, as the uniquely British obsessions with CCTV and personal liberty seemed increasingly incompatible. But demand for the state to intrude less was coupled with outrage at the apparent negligence that led to the horrific deaths of children, including Victoria Climbié in 2000 and Peter Connelly, known as Baby P, in 2008.

The decade ends as it began, with new aspirations to safeguard people and values conflicting with failures in implementing them. In the UK – "A land of just and old renown, where freedom broadens slowly down," said Tennyson – it will be remembered as a time when the pace of change was not too slow, and often in the wrong direction.