I Book Review: National Security and the European Convention on Human Rights
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410402200412 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Part D: DocumentationI Book Review |
from the original and very valuable idea of an objective moral standard that protects
against the arbitrariness of both public and private decision makers. It is so far
remote that I doubt whether the term natural law could be used. For example, the
developments in case-law which led to a de facto legislation of euthanasia by the
courts in the past cannot in my view be seen as an example of the return of natural
law, but more as evidence of the ever decreasing influence of substantive moral
standards in our legal order, especially in the field of the right to life. More in
general, I think that the idea of the privatisation of standard setting in the moral
field will not automatically lead to the return of morality in the law. Morality is more
than the sum of the preferences involved, or the majority opinion which emerges
from a discussion in a committee. In many cases it is something quite different and
necessary to correct personal or group proclivities. It can be asked whether the
common good can ever be decentralised.
I have to conclude. The last remarks make already clear that the book provokes
to discussion. That is an additional value and no doubt one of the objectives of the
author in writing it. It can be expected that it will be used in the years to come in the
important discussions on the future of our legal order.
Iain Cameron,
National Security and the European Convention on Human
Rights
, Kluwer Law International, The Hague
etc.
, 2000, xxxii + 479 p.,
ISBN 90-411-1411-4*
A Ph.D. candidate faces many dangers. One of them is that the subject of the
research changes in a radical way during the final stages of the research – think of
the crucial judgement that is published on the day that the proofs are to be sent off.
The subject may even simply disappear. A colleague wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the
external relations of an international organisation – the organisation was abolished
altogether within years after publication of the thesis. I myself wrote a thesis on the
position of the EU vis-a
`-vis the European Convention on Human Rights, starting
from the assumption that the EU would never accede to this Convention and would
never adopt its own human rights catalogue. Within two months after I had defended
my thesis, German Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer proposed an EU Charter of
Fundamental Rights coupled with EU accession to the ECHR. In this situation the
only consolation comes from the idea that the thesis must contain bits that continue
to be relevant. The last line of defence is that the research was a useful exercise for
personal purposes anyway.
It is highly unlikely that Iain Cameron’s doctoral thesis faces a similar fate.
Originally submitted in the early 1990s, enlarged and up-dated in the late 1990s,
National Security and the European Convention on Human Rights was published in 2000.
Four years later, the topic is arguably the most pressing one on the human rights
agenda. This may justify a book review at this very late stage (a delay for which the
present reviewer bears sole responsibility), and indeed it may even make a review all
the more interesting: does a ‘pre 11 September’ analysis still have anything
meaningful to offer after more than three years of ‘war on terrorism’? Or do the
terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid and Beslan (to mention only
those that took place in the Western world) constitute a fundamental change of
I Book Reviews
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol. 22/4 (2004) 695
* Rick Lawson, Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Leiden, the Netherlands.
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