A Western ideal transformed into a shield for terrorists.

Jan 31, 2012
WSJ
By BRET STEPHENS

What is a human right?

Consider the case of a Romanian man named Ionescu—not the absurdist playwright himself, but very much in the master’s tradition—who once took the 2,000-mile bus ride from Bucharest to Madrid. His seat did not fully recline. The bus company’s advertising had promised it would.

So Mr. Ionescu sued. For €90.

First he sued his way through the Romanian judiciary, including the High Court. After his appeals failed at home, he went to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, insisting that the Romanian courts had denied him a right to a fair hearing.

The complaint was lodged in October 2004. It was rejected, by a seven-judge panel, in June 2010. Mr. Ionescu did not get his €90, though what his case cost European taxpayers the ECHR did not say. The court did note, however, that the suit was “[not] manifestly ill-founded or an abuse of the right of application.” In other words, the ECHR thought the case was a close call.

It would be nice if the Ionescu case were just another piece of Eurosilliness of the likes British tabloids love to lampoon. Closer to the truth is that it’s a comic emblem of a tragic decline. One after another, public institutions and private organizations devoted to the defense of human rights are bringing those rights into wholesale disrepute.

Take the ECHR, which grandly claims to “protect the rights of 800 million people in 47 states.” In 1999, the court agreed to consider 8,400 applications. A decade later it was dealing with 57,200 applications, plus an additional backlog of 119,300. The court says that 90% of those cases are inadmissible and has taken steps to deal with it.

But the explosion in cases raises the question of why so many people are now turning to the court. In an important and overlooked speech last Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron offered an answer: The court, he warned, was in the process of turning itself into an immigration tribunal, a small-claims court and a “court of fourth instance”—a kind of super-Supreme Court for petitioners who have exhausted their options at the national level.

Call it the legal corollary of Say’s Law: Supply creates its own demand. The more “human rights” there are, the more human rights cases there will be.

Is that a problem? It is, when the cases are spurious. It is, too, when a court’s definition of human rights routinely contradicts the views of ordinary people, democratic parliaments, and duly constituted national courts.

The latest Exhibit A in ECHR over-reach is its Jan. 16 ruling in the case of Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist cleric born in Bethlehem, based in London, and wanted on terrorism-related charges in Algeria, Jordan, the U.S., Belgium, Spain, France and Italy. The U.K. government (which has never charged Mr. Qatada with a crime though it has repeatedly detained him), wants to deport him to Jordan and has negotiated a “no torture” agreement with Amman. Britain’s Law Lords blessed the deportation in 2009.

But not the Strasbourg court. It stopped the deportation on the grounds that a prospective conviction of Mr. Qatada in a Jordanian court might be based on evidence extracted by torture from a co-defendant. A deportation, the court ruled, would “legitimize the torture of witnesses and suspects.”

Maybe that’s high-minded. But the upshot for Britain is that Mr. Qatada is a free man, getting £1,000 a month in welfare checks. Not bad for a guy who arrived in the U.K. on a fake passport, won asylum on grounds that he faced religious persecution in Jordan (while practicing it in his sermons), and then became a tutor and inspiration to the likes of Mohammad Atta, Richard Reid, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Nor is Mr. Qatada’s case an aberration. A U.K. government report released last year found that in 2010 some 200 foreign criminals avoided deportation by citing Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the “right to family and private life”—the latter defined as “studies, employment, friendships and sexuality.” Altogether, 3,775 former foreign national prisoners remained in Britain despite efforts by the U.K. Border Agency to send them home.

In his speech, Mr. Cameron put his finger on the effects of all this. “For too many people, the very concept of rights is in danger of slipping from something noble to something discredited,” he said. “It has a corrosive effect on people’s support for human rights.”

That’s right. And it’s equally corrosive when Amnesty International makes a poster child of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and suspected al Qaeda recruiter, or when Human Rights Watch becomes the leading anti-Israel propagandist of the present day—to the point of being publicly denounced by its founder. Human rights were once a pillar of democratic decency. The people who now usually claim to speak for those rights have systematically transformed them into a weapon against democracies and a shield for terrorists.

What is happening to human rights today is not a first: Other Western ideals—democracy, equality, freedom—have all been hijacked by the enemies of democracy, equality and freedom. How do you mount a rescue attempt for human rights?

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577192762570509048.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

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