The 'Dark Side' of the UN’s War on Terrorism
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Description
As other chapters in this book demonstrates, the 'dark side' of rights emerges when the right of certain groups or individuals conflict with one another and one group's (or one person's) rights are privileged over another's. As Sanford Levinson reminds us, this may occur in the course of a national emergency when government officials elevate 'freedom from fear' (now sometimes recast as the need to protect the rights to security of the person) over the due process (or other) rights of those whom are seen as possibly eliciting such fear. The prospect of abuse of rights in the name of security emerges on a daily basis for those rights-respecting societies faced with the need to choose between the security rights of the majority versus, for example, the rights to privacy of those who face intrusive scrutiny or searches, whether based on racial profiling or not. As Shlomo Avineri reminds us, we have recognized such tensions from the time of Tocqueville, as with respect to the tensions between liberty and equality. The 'Darth Vader' side of rights also emerges, as Martin Krygier and Gianluigi Palombella indicate, when government officials or judges abuse certain human rights through the use of the rule of law (as when governmental international assistance programs marginalize economic and social rights through western rule of law development programs that privilege certain civil and political rights like the right to vote over the right to eat) or when courts adhere to the formal rule of law to the detriment of respecting substantive rights in the case at hand (as was regularly done by Nazi officials or the Stalinist judiciary).
Source Publication
Abuse: The Dark Side of Fundamental Rights
Source Editors/Authors
András Sajó
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Alvarez, José E., "The 'Dark Side' of the UN’s War on Terrorism" (2006). Faculty Chapters. 80.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/80
