The Rule of Law Has No Exceptions

There should not be any gray zone between war and peace, where human rights don’t apply to the strong. In war, the laws of war apply; in peace, the laws of peace. Any lawless area in between, where people can be deprived of their human rights, held arbitrarily captive and subjected to torture, does not and should not exist. That the U.S. tortures alleged terrorists and arbitrarily shuts them away in Guantanamo is an ongoing legal scandal.

Almost 12 years after the attack against the World Trade Center in New York, there are no excuses left for not closing the detention center and either prosecuting or freeing the remaining prisoners. President Obama has broken his promise to close the Guantanamo detention camp within five years.

In a very important article in Dagens Nyheter,* Hans Corell, the former legal counsel for the U.N., writes that the issue of human rights has taken a deplorable turn after Sept. 11, 2001. It was then that the members of the terrorist movement al-Qaida hijacked passenger planes over the U.S. and succeeded in crashing two of them into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon.

Then-U.S. President George W. Bush responded by declaring war on terrorism and stating that in this war, the rest of the world’s nations were either for or against America. Even Sweden yielded by secretly handing over Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed El Zari to the CIA for transport to Egypt, imprisonment and torture. Corell cites a report that George Soros’ Open Society Foundations published on Feb. 5:

“The report is a frightening account of how 54 nations, Sweden among them, assisted the American CIA with extraordinary renditions and secret internment of suspected terrorists. The common denominator in the 136 cases reviewed in the report (the total number is unknown) is that those concerned were subjected to torture or other inhumane or degrading treatment.”

The history of human rights is long. The crucial test came after World War II. The Nuremberg trials’ judgment against leading Nazis from 1945 through 1948 builds upon the conception that there are universal human rights that do not cease to apply in war and that are relevant regardless of legislation. The most important compilation of these rights was made in 1948 in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is easy to take that which is good for granted; however, human rights need to be defended constantly. Of course, the world’s democracies should spearhead the defense and not grant themselves or their allies exceptions. The same rules and measures ought to apply to all, regardless of military might or political system. Democracies have no special right to violate human rights.

The Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund has, together with other human rights organizations, published a document titled “Rule of Law: A Guide for Politicians.” It is available in several languages and fulfills an explicit need.

*Editor’s note: Dagens Nyheter is a Swedish daily newspaper.