Human rights in the ‘war on terror’

Since the end of the cold war, human rights has become the dominant vocabulary in foreign affairs. The question after September 11 is whether the era of human rights has come and gone. Michael Ignatieff, New York Times, 5 February 2002 The idea of rights is nothing but the concept of virtue applied to the world of politics. By means of the idea of rights men have defined the nature of license and of tyranny no man can be great without virtue, nor any nation great without respect for rights. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, [1835]1991: 219 After the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, have human rights irretrievably lost their status in international affairs and national policy-making? Or, as de Tocqueville declares, must rights always remain a fundamental part of democratic politics since they define the boundary between individual license and government tyranny? There now exists a plethora of books on international affairs after 9/11, too many to cite here, which examine the political fallout of the attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. response. Many are concerned with judging the proportionality of the U.S. response to Islamist terrorism, and in particular determining the justness or otherwise of U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this literature, human rights issues such as the treatment of terror suspects may appear in passing, but usually to the extent that they impinge on other, wider political aims, such as holding credible elections in Iraq.