WEBVTT 00:00:11.034 --> 00:00:14.049 Many of you in this room have been reading in the 00:00:14.049 --> 00:00:17.396 papers over the last few days about what's going on in Syria. 00:00:17.396 --> 00:00:21.768 And probably you are as appalled as anyone else 00:00:21.768 --> 00:00:25.265 of the images of mass killing on all sides, 00:00:25.265 --> 00:00:28.787 of the taking of innocent life of children, women, 00:00:28.787 --> 00:00:30.585 completely defenseless people. 00:00:30.585 --> 00:00:32.786 And you're probably asking yourselves: 00:00:32.786 --> 00:00:36.879 "Why isn't anything being done to stop it?" 00:00:36.879 --> 00:00:41.446 I want to talk a little bit about the system of international rules 00:00:41.446 --> 00:00:44.029 that allows you to begin to answer that question. 00:00:44.029 --> 00:00:48.298 And I want to do it by reference to a case to have come to, 00:00:48.298 --> 00:00:52.818 as I conclude, that took place ultimately in the Houses of Parliament. 00:00:52.818 --> 00:00:55.597 The judgment given in November 1998 00:00:55.597 --> 00:00:58.499 in a case that many of you would be familiar with involving 00:00:58.499 --> 00:01:03.046 senator Augusto Pinochet. Decisive moment that goes 00:01:03.046 --> 00:01:06.025 very closely to the kinds of issues we're talking about 00:01:06.025 --> 00:01:07.710 when we ask the question: NOTE Paragraph 00:01:07.710 --> 00:01:13.593 "Why isn't president Assad being stopped from killing?" 00:01:13.593 --> 00:01:16.031 I work as an international lawyer. You've probably have 00:01:16.031 --> 00:01:18.024 heard about international law. You probably don't know 00:01:18.024 --> 00:01:22.015 a huge amount about what international law is. 00:01:22.015 --> 00:01:25.459 It's traditionally described as the rules that govern 00:01:25.459 --> 00:01:27.089 the relations between states. 00:01:27.089 --> 00:01:30.990 I wake up in the morning, I switch on my computer, 00:01:30.990 --> 00:01:34.301 I have emails about the sort of cases and issues that I'm involved in: 00:01:34.301 --> 00:01:40.912 the protection of human rights in the former Yugoslavia, the cases of Vukovar; 00:01:40.912 --> 00:01:45.735 the right to return of the Chagossians to the Island of Chagos, 00:01:45.735 --> 00:01:48.167 part of the decolonization problems involving 00:01:48.167 --> 00:01:53.033 the United Kingdom and a load of other cases. 00:01:53.033 --> 00:01:55.914 And classically the world that I deal with, 00:01:55.914 --> 00:01:58.582 is a world between states, 00:01:58.582 --> 00:02:01.064 it's a world which governs relations between 00:02:01.064 --> 00:02:05.054 the two hundred or so countries that occupy the world. 00:02:05.054 --> 00:02:08.096 If you were to step back from this planet, jump up to the moon, 00:02:08.096 --> 00:02:12.083 and look at how we organize ourselves 00:02:12.083 --> 00:02:14.288 you'd think it's pretty weird. 00:02:14.288 --> 00:02:18.969 We've divided ourselves into about two hundred countries 00:02:18.969 --> 00:02:21.803 and the basic idea of international law is that 00:02:21.803 --> 00:02:26.492 within those two hundred countries -- and it used to be 00:02:26.492 --> 00:02:29.801 only forty or fifty in the 18th and 19th centuries -- 00:02:29.801 --> 00:02:35.045 states, governments are free to do whatever they want 00:02:35.045 --> 00:02:36.846 to their citizens. 00:02:36.846 --> 00:02:40.166 They can torture them, they can kill them, 00:02:40.166 --> 00:02:41.711 they can disappear them, 00:02:41.711 --> 00:02:44.025 they can adopt rules saying that, you know: 00:02:44.025 --> 00:02:46.033 "every female over the age of sixty is going to be killed," 00:02:46.033 --> 00:02:49.490 "every male under the age of fifteen is going to be killed." 00:02:49.490 --> 00:02:52.644 The classic rules of international law are premised on 00:02:52.644 --> 00:02:59.621 the concept of sovereignty, the power -- absolute power of the state. 00:02:59.621 --> 00:03:04.076 That changed dramatically in the 20th century 00:03:04.076 --> 00:03:08.032 and it's the idea that is at the heart of that change, 00:03:08.032 --> 00:03:13.047 the idea that finally gives a role and a place for an individual 00:03:13.047 --> 00:03:17.321 that is at the heart of the answer to the question that I posed at the outset 00:03:17.321 --> 00:03:21.034 and that dominates the answer to that question. 00:03:21.034 --> 00:03:24.093 It's the one that I want you to think about. 00:03:24.093 --> 00:03:29.435 What happened? We know about the atrocities in Stalin's Soviet Union. 00:03:29.435 --> 00:03:32.758 We know about the atrocities in Germany 00:03:32.758 --> 00:03:36.037 and in many occupied countries in the '30s and in the '40s 00:03:36.037 --> 00:03:38.063 and the argument of the government of those countries 00:03:38.063 --> 00:03:41.068 at the time was: "Well, we may have domestic rules 00:03:41.068 --> 00:03:43.721 that limit what we can do but there's no rule of 00:03:43.721 --> 00:03:46.711 international law that stops the killing." 00:03:46.711 --> 00:03:49.869 Individuals have no rights. 00:03:49.869 --> 00:03:53.092 A very small number of people in the middle part of the 20th century 00:03:53.092 --> 00:03:59.177 started developing the idea that actually individuals did have rights. 00:03:59.177 --> 00:04:03.396 And the rights of individuals were exercisable against state. 00:04:03.396 --> 00:04:08.027 For the first time, ever, the very recent idea 00:04:08.027 --> 00:04:10.376 an individual could stand up and say: 00:04:10.376 --> 00:04:14.062 "You Mr President are not allowed to do that. 00:04:14.062 --> 00:04:17.349 You are subject to constraints, not the constraints of 00:04:17.365 --> 00:04:19.704 your domestic legal order but the constraints of 00:04:19.704 --> 00:04:22.777 your international legal order." 00:04:22.777 --> 00:04:25.025 And that's what culminated in the creation of instruments 00:04:25.025 --> 00:04:28.048 that many of you are very familiar with: 00:04:28.048 --> 00:04:30.012 the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, 00:04:30.012 --> 00:04:33.043 the European Convention on Human Rights and then 00:04:33.043 --> 00:04:36.011 other instruments that emerged in the late 1990s like 00:04:36.011 --> 00:04:38.710 -- also in 1998 the year of the Pinochet case, 00:04:38.710 --> 00:04:42.041 the statute of the International Criminal Court. 00:04:42.041 --> 00:04:45.209 In fact that was the year that was vital for another reason, 00:04:45.209 --> 00:04:47.580 in that same year - 1998 - for the first time ever, 00:04:47.580 --> 00:04:52.024 for the first time in human history, a serving head of state 00:04:52.024 --> 00:04:55.592 was indicted by an international court: 00:04:55.592 --> 00:04:59.091 Slobodan Milošević. It had never happened before. 00:04:59.091 --> 00:05:04.283 Now that is a vital change. A change which is premised on 00:05:04.283 --> 00:05:09.414 the very simple idea that individuals have rights against their state. 00:05:09.414 --> 00:05:13.710 That was a development that was hard fought for 00:05:13.710 --> 00:05:16.080 and which, I have to say right now, is under challenge 00:05:16.080 --> 00:05:20.681 and under threat. Why? Well, many of you remember 00:05:20.681 --> 00:05:23.051 the events of September 11th NOTE Paragraph 00:05:23.051 --> 00:05:27.020 and with the events of September 11th a number of governments 00:05:27.020 --> 00:05:30.049 that had been at the heart of promoting the idea that 00:05:30.049 --> 00:05:34.547 "every human person has rights", an idea reflected for the 00:05:34.547 --> 00:05:37.075 first time in a very obscure document called 00:05:37.075 --> 00:05:41.054 the 'Atlantic Charter' adopted in 1941 by Churchill and 00:05:41.054 --> 00:05:45.928 Roosevelt, that idea that "every individual has rights, 00:05:45.928 --> 00:05:50.005 whoever they are, wherever they may be, in whatever 00:05:50.005 --> 00:05:53.088 circumstance they may find themselves in" is now under 00:05:53.088 --> 00:05:57.089 threat from those who promoted the very idea. 00:05:57.089 --> 00:06:00.063 Why is it under threat? Well, many of you are familiar with 00:06:00.063 --> 00:06:03.008 the stories about banging people up because they are alleged 00:06:03.008 --> 00:06:06.052 to be terrorists and holding them without charge 00:06:06.052 --> 00:06:10.090 indefinitely for the rest of their lives -- I wrote a book about that. 00:06:10.090 --> 00:06:13.076 About and individual Mohammed al-Qahtani arrested in 00:06:13.076 --> 00:06:19.465 2002 still detained at Guantanamo, has not being charged, 00:06:19.465 --> 00:06:24.185 has no release date and it appears will be held for the rest 00:06:24.185 --> 00:06:28.648 of his natural life because of a 'so called' war on terror. 00:06:28.648 --> 00:06:32.077 You're familiar with the idea of "drones", the idea that 00:06:32.077 --> 00:06:35.428 all of a sudden because we are 'at war' 00:06:35.428 --> 00:06:38.058 we are free as a nation, 00:06:38.058 --> 00:06:41.935 or as Americans, to define individuals who pose 00:06:41.935 --> 00:06:45.681 a threat to our society and just take them out. 00:06:45.681 --> 00:06:50.482 Other people call that extrajudicial killing. 00:06:50.482 --> 00:06:54.168 It's done in Afghanistan and it's extended beyond the war-zone 00:06:54.168 --> 00:06:58.746 to places like Pakistan and to places like Yemen. 00:06:58.746 --> 00:07:00.693 Well, if you are going to take people out 00:07:00.693 --> 00:07:03.828 because they are alleged Al Qaeda individuals in Pakistan 00:07:03.828 --> 00:07:07.048 why not do it in Edgware? Where do the limits stop? 00:07:07.048 --> 00:07:10.366 When you start deciding you are simply going to eliminate those 00:07:10.366 --> 00:07:15.451 individuals abandoning the rules that were put in place 00:07:15.451 --> 00:07:19.002 in that remarkable period in the decade after 00:07:19.002 --> 00:07:20.086 the Second World War. 00:07:20.086 --> 00:07:25.020 So, we face a fundamental challenge in relation to 00:07:25.020 --> 00:07:29.097 whether we care about these rights. The idea the individual 00:07:29.097 --> 00:07:34.072 is now an actor on the international stage and has rights 00:07:34.072 --> 00:07:39.057 exercisable not only in relation to his or her fellow individuals 00:07:39.057 --> 00:07:44.033 but against the state. And rights not just before national courts, 00:07:44.033 --> 00:07:47.020 rights before an international court and international instances. 00:07:47.020 --> 00:07:52.754 That was a hard fought victory in the 1940s NOTE Paragraph 00:07:52.754 --> 00:07:56.982 it was unique, for millennia there had not been such rights 00:07:56.982 --> 00:08:00.519 and yet there are now people in this country, too 00:08:00.519 --> 00:08:04.818 in this parliament also who say the time has come for 00:08:04.818 --> 00:08:09.004 the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Convention 00:08:09.004 --> 00:08:11.278 on Human Rights. Because, why? Because they don't like 00:08:11.278 --> 00:08:15.039 judgments about prisoners' voting rights or they don't like 00:08:15.039 --> 00:08:18.014 the way in which certain immigrants are allowed to have 00:08:18.014 --> 00:08:22.020 certain rights but that is the essence of human rights. 00:08:22.020 --> 00:08:26.022 That is the essence of the system that was put in place, 00:08:26.022 --> 00:08:30.662 is that no one falls into a black hole. 00:08:30.662 --> 00:08:36.064 Everyone has minimum rights at all times and in all circumstances. 00:08:36.064 --> 00:08:39.141 And at the heart of that idea is the place of 00:08:39.141 --> 00:08:46.161 every human individual having indivisible rights to be exercised at all times. 00:08:46.161 --> 00:08:51.701 Now, I mentioned this building Parliament and why it was significant. 00:08:51.701 --> 00:08:55.330 On the 24th of November 1998 I was involved 00:08:55.330 --> 00:08:59.033 in receiving a judgment in a case that I've been involved in -- 00:08:59.033 --> 00:09:02.664 the Pinochet case. And in sense the case articulated the 00:09:02.664 --> 00:09:07.136 moment when the idea of individual rights became very real. 00:09:07.136 --> 00:09:11.327 What was an issue? Some of you will remember what happened. 00:09:11.327 --> 00:09:16.143 Senator Pinochet came to the United Kingdom, for medical treatment. 00:09:16.143 --> 00:09:19.047 He took tea with some rather powerful friends and 00:09:19.047 --> 00:09:22.049 then one day out of the blue a knock came on the door 00:09:22.049 --> 00:09:25.799 and he was arrested. Arrested for allegations of international 00:09:25.799 --> 00:09:31.033 crimes committed in Chile very far away not even against 00:09:31.033 --> 00:09:33.176 British nationals. 00:09:33.176 --> 00:09:37.012 The idea was posited on something called 'universal jurisdiction' 00:09:37.012 --> 00:09:43.773 the idea that some crimes: torture, disappearing, killing on a significant scale, 00:09:43.773 --> 00:09:47.193 crimes against humanity that are so terrible 00:09:47.193 --> 00:09:51.029 that any country can exercise jurisdiction in relation to those crimes. 00:09:51.029 --> 00:09:54.039 And a Spanish prosecuting judge decided to indict 00:09:54.039 --> 00:09:57.708 senator Pinochet for those crimes and he was in England, 00:09:57.708 --> 00:10:02.861 an arrest warrant was issued seeking his extradition to Spain. 00:10:02.861 --> 00:10:05.435 Senator Pinochet did exactly what one would 00:10:05.435 --> 00:10:11.025 expect him to do, he said: "You can't arrest me, I am the State." 00:10:11.025 --> 00:10:14.033 That's the 19th century view of international law. 00:10:14.033 --> 00:10:19.056 'L'Etat, c'est moi.' I have absolute power and you 00:10:19.056 --> 00:10:23.081 the English courts, the Law lords on the House of Lords are 00:10:23.081 --> 00:10:27.051 not entitled to overwrite my immunity. 00:10:27.051 --> 00:10:31.883 The case was argued for quite a few days and a couple of 00:10:31.883 --> 00:10:34.541 weeks after it was argued we trotted off to 00:10:34.541 --> 00:10:37.035 the Chamber of the House of Lords, when the grand old tradition 00:10:37.035 --> 00:10:39.693 has changed now, we got a Supreme Court, 00:10:39.693 --> 00:10:43.506 five Law Lords stood up in turn to give the judgment. 00:10:43.506 --> 00:10:46.412 It was the single most decisive 00:10:46.412 --> 00:10:49.479 and defining moment of my professional life 00:10:49.479 --> 00:10:54.034 in which the system of international rules, the old system, was cast away. 00:10:54.034 --> 00:10:58.933 Never before had any former head of State been held 00:10:58.933 --> 00:11:01.087 in the courts of this country or any other country outside 00:11:01.087 --> 00:11:08.392 his own to be not entitled to claim immunity for a mass crime. 00:11:08.392 --> 00:11:12.092 And the Law Lords took their vote, very soon on we would 00:11:12.092 --> 00:11:18.344 two nil down. Two out of the five had voted for immunity. 00:11:18.344 --> 00:11:23.009 And then it was 2-1 and then it was 2-2 and there was one 00:11:23.009 --> 00:11:26.532 judge left to express a view and at the moment when 00:11:26.532 --> 00:11:31.002 that judge articulated his view things were very finely balanced. 00:11:31.002 --> 00:11:36.987 You go with the old system: absolute immunity for former head of State. 00:11:36.987 --> 00:11:39.013 Or do you go with the new system? 00:11:39.013 --> 00:11:43.068 The system that says individuals have rights 00:11:43.068 --> 00:11:47.021 and that right includes the right to proceedings, legal proceedings against 00:11:47.021 --> 00:11:51.021 people who commit crimes that are particularly heinous. 00:11:51.021 --> 00:11:56.039 And the fifth judge -- the fifth judge said 'no immunity' 00:11:56.039 --> 00:12:00.529 and at that moment you can hear, you can still see it on 00:12:00.529 --> 00:12:03.022 the CNN website, the BBC website if you go to the archive 00:12:03.022 --> 00:12:06.940 there was certain sharp intake of breath. 00:12:06.940 --> 00:12:10.044 It was a remarkable moment because it was the moment 00:12:10.044 --> 00:12:15.026 more than any other where one recognised that the system 00:12:15.026 --> 00:12:21.104 had indeed changed and there's no room for complacency. 00:12:21.104 --> 00:12:25.972 A lot has happened since then. It's extraordinarily important 00:12:25.972 --> 00:12:30.012 that we do not lose the right of individuals to be protected 00:12:30.012 --> 00:12:33.900 against their own governments at any time. 00:12:33.900 --> 00:12:38.052 Every single person in Syria who is subject today in Homs 00:12:38.052 --> 00:12:44.040 or elsewhere, to the kind of heinous terrible indiscriminate attacks 00:12:44.040 --> 00:12:47.059 that are taking place is entitled to turn around to us 00:12:47.059 --> 00:12:51.548 and to say, to us and to our governments: 00:12:51.548 --> 00:12:55.043 "You adopted a new system in the middle of the last century, 00:12:55.043 --> 00:12:59.983 you are required to respect that system 00:12:59.983 --> 00:13:03.041 and you are required to protect us from this kind of 00:13:03.041 --> 00:13:05.300 system that is taking place." 00:13:05.300 --> 00:13:08.007 That is the new system of international law. 00:13:08.007 --> 00:13:11.104 That is the new set of rules that were talked about 00:13:11.104 --> 00:13:13.635 for the person who spoke, sang wonderfully credibly movingly 00:13:13.635 --> 00:13:16.091 just before me. 00:13:16.091 --> 00:13:19.853 That is a system which reflects a single idea: 00:13:19.853 --> 00:13:23.634 the place of the individual in international society. 00:13:23.634 --> 00:13:25.957 And I invite you all to think about it 00:13:25.957 --> 00:13:28.071 and to defend it with everything you have. 00:13:28.071 --> 00:13:30.056 Thank you very much. 00:13:30.056 --> 00:13:32.007 (Applause)