Introduction
1
Ever since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 a variety of commentators,
academics, and practitioners have listed the many casualties of the war on terror.
Apart from the loss of significant civilian life as part of the collateral damage
resulting from front line military activities, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq, one
significant casualty of the war on terror has been the protection of fundamental human
rights. In the effort to ensure internal security and pursue intelligence gathering,
democratic and non-democratic governments alike have used the war on terror to
justify curbing individual liberties and eroding fundamental freedoms, such as the
freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, freedom of movement, and privacy
of communication and correspondence. And many countries, especially democracies,
have passed some form of anti-terror legislation, which either have broad aims to curb
terrorist activity or more narrow aims to limit the activities seen to support terrorism,
such as money laundering and the maintenance of communications networks (see UN
2002: ST/LEG/SER.B/22).
Beyond the more salient cases of human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo Bay, the collection of documentation of legal reasoning within the US
Department of Justice on the use of torture (see Greenberg and Dratel 2005), and the
findings of the Council of Europe about anti-terror legislation and practices in the
United Kingdom (COE/CommDH/2005/6), are the every day forms of abuse
experienced throughout the world as a result of the war on terror. International and
domestic human rights NGOs have argued that since September 11, 2001 human
rights have been under attack and their express legal protection has been rolled back
significantly across many countries in the world, where individuals and groups are
Convention