Why Human Rights Will Prevail in the War on Terror

Abstract

The standard view, held by many human rights scholars, is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, the initiation of the War on Terror, and the subsequent US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, have been very bad for human rights. These events marked the beginning a of moral slide in which internationally recognized human rights norms, for instance, concerning torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and fair trial, came increasingly under attack from democratic states seeking to protect their citizens from future terrorist attacks. On this view, the security and counterterrorism policies adopted by the Bush Administration and some other governments have undermined the integrity of the entire post-Second World War human rights framework.