http://www.legalfrontiers.ca/2010/03/balancing-liberty-and-security/ McGill's Blog on International Law Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:16:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://www.legalfrontiers.ca/2010/03/balancing-liberty-and-security/comment-page-1/#comment-114 Steven Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:14:45 +0000 http://www.legalfrontiers.ca/?p=830#comment-114 It seems to me that one of the major underlying causes of civil liberty infringements during the war on terror, has been the gap between the intelligence and anti-terror capabilities of government vis-a-vis the suicide bombing threat. We weren't prepared to deal with de-centralized terror cells connected tenuously by a global islamic jihadist ideology, and so our knee-jerk reaction was to focus on the religious and cultural identity of the terrorists and consequently target all muslims and arabs for heightened scrutiny. This led to some notably cases of false imprisonment. An interesting legal parallel exists in U.S. and to a lesser extent Canadian criminal law, where complaints of "profiling" against black suspects has led to improvements in due process rules. Law enforcement complain about the added hoops they need to jump through in order to stop, question, arrest, and convict a suspect, but the net result is an increase in professionalism and quality standards. If indeed the civil liberties violations are the result of the anxiety caused by government's inability to effectively track and target genuine terrorists (insufficient organizational and resource capabilities), I suspect that we won't see significant improvements on the civil liberties side, until this changes. It seems to me that one of the major underlying causes of civil liberty infringements during the war on terror, has been the gap between the intelligence and anti-terror capabilities of government vis-a-vis the suicide bombing threat. We weren’t prepared to deal with de-centralized terror cells connected tenuously by a global islamic jihadist ideology, and so our knee-jerk reaction was to focus on the religious and cultural identity of the terrorists and consequently target all muslims and arabs for heightened scrutiny. This led to some notably cases of false imprisonment. An interesting legal parallel exists in U.S. and to a lesser extent Canadian criminal law, where complaints of “profiling” against black suspects has led to improvements in due process rules. Law enforcement complain about the added hoops they need to jump through in order to stop, question, arrest, and convict a suspect, but the net result is an increase in professionalism and quality standards. If indeed the civil liberties violations are the result of the anxiety caused by government’s inability to effectively track and target genuine terrorists (insufficient organizational and resource capabilities), I suspect that we won’t see significant improvements on the civil liberties side, until this changes.

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