The sovereign continent tells the de-sceptered Isle it can’t expel terror suspects

The good old Mail, which combines endless bad news about immigration and crime with endless mildly titilating stories of celebrities’ latest sex affairs and nude photo shoots (yet which, I am told, is relatively decorous, even, uh, middle-class compared to the rest of Britain’s press), reports:

Terrorist suspects must stay in Britain in case they are tortured at home, say human rights judges

Britain could be stuck with more than a dozen international terror suspects after a devastating ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.

Judges said the right of a fanatic to be protected from torture in his homeland was “absolute”.

They rejected arguments that, in trying to deport an extremist to a country with a history of torture, the rights of British citizens to be protected from attack in their homeland should be considered, too….

Britain had “intervened” on the crucial case, in an effort to establish it could deport more than a dozen terror suspects being held in secure jails.

The court described as “misconceived” the UK and Italian arguments that the risk to a terror suspect should be balanced against the risk they pose to innocent civilians.

Judges instead said the terror suspect had an “absolute” right to protection from torture - and this must come first.

It effectively upheld an earlier judgement blamed by ministers for our woeful failure to deport extremists….

A Home Office spokesman said: “We intervened because terrorism undermines fundamental human rights - including the right to life. The Government is disappointed.” [cont.]

See? The only justification the pathetic, terminally wimpy, beaten Brits can summon for expelling a terrorist from their country is that he’s a threat to “human rights”! Not a threat to human life, to the human race, to civilization, to Britain. But if the only operative principle is individual rights, not the natural right of societies to protect themselves from enemies and malefactors, then the poor little jihadist has rights, too, doesn’t he?

Calling this ruling “devastating” is like calling a ruling that under the Sexual Orientation Regulations Catholic adoption agencies must give babies to homosexual couples “shocking.” It’s not shocking, man. It is a logical and inevitable result of the very system of universal rights and EU sovereignty that the British people have adopted as their law.

How many people showed up in London to mourn Princess Diana? Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. How many people marched in London against the U.S. plan to invade Iraq? Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. And how many have marched in London to protest the totalitarian hate-speech laws, EU membership, and the EU’s power to impose its vision of international human rights on the government of Britain? Zilch.

If the Mail, instead of calling the pro-terrorist ruling “devastating,” had called it “a logical and inevitable result of the ideological system that we, the people and government of Britain, have voluntarily embraced,” then THAT would be devastating.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 04, 2008 12:14 AM | Send