Reid: Greatest Threat to British Civil Liberties?
Home Secretary John Reid has called for human rights laws to be rewritten to protect people against terrorism.
In a speech in Venice to ministers of the six largest EU nations, he said the current situation was unacceptable.
Citizens were not being protected by politicians who followed case law "to the letter", Mr Reid said.
But Shami Chakrabarti, from Liberty, said human rights would be improved by encouraging freedoms, not by destroying legal frameworks already in place.
Ms Chakrabarti, who is the director of the human rights organisation, said: "In this struggle, we have to work with allies around the world to make sure they up their game on human rights because terrorism is being bred in countries which have the worst human rights records.
"We need to up their game - not dilute our great traditions of rights and freedoms."
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6648849.stm)
Oh yes! Of course we must! Let's rewrite human rights law in order to stop it protecting our liberties and make it protect nothing whatsoever, since changing the law will categorically not protect us from terrorism in this instance. It has been said that "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither"; now, in this day and age, it is even more essential to remember and even more true than it was when Benjamin Franklin originally said it over two centuries ago (if indeed he did). It is simply impossible to say that we must sacrifice our rights to protect our rights; its oxymoronic and downright moronic. Its the act not of a democracy but a tyranny in waiting. Well, let's hope the Commons and Lords realise this and uphold the Human Rights Act (1998) against future attacks on it by the government, shall we not? But do they have the gumption to stand up to the party whips? Do they have the guts to go against the party line? Or must we suffer our elected representatives, and our unelected nonrepresentatives, voting to destroy that very democracy, that very set of freedoms, those very essential rights, that got them into the positions they are in in the first place? Oh, what hateful times we live in, where we lose our liberty under the guise of security and our security from government under the guise of security from terrorism (we're more likely, remember, to die by car accident...). Bear this in mind next election... and bear in mind which parties agree with him.
(yes, the choice of icon is purposefully ironic)