 The Belomage prison case was looked at at several levels of the court system. But I want to focus here on the decision of only one of those courts, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. I should explain that the Belomage case was decided in 2004, well before the judicial functions of the House of Lords were transferred to what now the UK Supreme Court. At that time then, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords was the UK's apex court, or its highest court, albeit that beyond the UK further claims could, as they still can, be brought in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. What then was the issue that the House of Lords had to resolve in the Belomage case? The government argued that the foreign terrorist suspect's right to liberty could in effect be suspended and suspended lawfully because the get-out clause in the European Convention, Article 15, applied. The key question was whether that was the case. Could the right to liberty, which is normally protected by Article 5 of the European Convention, be suspended by relying on Article 15? And in that way, was it possible to avoid any clash between the Convention and the legislation providing the detention of the suspects? Article 15 does not allow government to suspend human rights just because they feel like it, quite the reverse. Preventing people from exercising their fundamental rights is a very serious step, and Article 15 rightly sets out some very strict conditions that have to be met before that step can be taken. So what are those conditions? First, there has to be a war or public emergency threatening the life of the nation. Second, if there is, then a state like the UK can, in the words of Article 15, derogate from the Convention to the extent strictly required by the exigences of the situation. In other words, human rights can be suspended as long as there is a war or public emergency, but only to the extent the suspension of the right is made strictly necessary by the nature and severity of that emergency. So, in Belmarsh, the House of Lords had to decide whether those two conditions were met. First then, was there a war or a public emergency threatening the life of the nation? Of the nine judges or law lords, as House of Lords judges were known, who decided the Belmarsh case, eight thought that there was. None of those eight thought that there was a war, notwithstanding the rhetoric of the war on terror. But eight law lords were prepared to accept the government's argument that nine 11 attacks amounted to evidence of a global terror threat that was sufficiently likely to affect the UK and if it did, was sufficiently likely to be sufficiently catastrophic as to amount to a public emergency threatening the life of the nation. One of the nine law lords, however, didn't think there was a war or a public emergency. Lord Hoffman argued that the others had misunderstood what Article 15 of the Convention means when it refers to an emergency that threatens the life of the nation. He agreed that Al Qaeda might well have been a threat the lives of individual people. But he went on, terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our institutions of government or our existence as a civil community. This disagreement between Lord Hoffman and the other eight judges reflects more than a dry, technical difference of opinion about the precise meaning of Article 15 of the Convention. Rather, Lord Hoffman's position was informed by his view about just how fundamental human rights are and therefore about how easily they should give way to other considerations such as a terror threat. Of course, this doesn't mean that the other law lords didn't think human rights were important, if I've promised, but they did disagree about the relative importance of individuals' rights on the one hand and the extent to which those rights should be capable of being sacrificed or at least qualified in order to secure other interests. What about the second question then? Was indefinite detention without charge or trial and necessary response to the emergency that the majority of judges was prepared to acknowledge? The eight judges who thought there was a public emergency had to go on to decide whether the nature and seriousness of the emergency was sufficient to justify the particular step that had been taken, that is indefinitely detaining foreign terror suspects without charge or trial. Seven of the eight judges who addressed this point said it was not. The government had failed to show that steps as drastic as that were necessary. In particular, the government had failed to show that lesser steps, such as surveillance, monitoring and tagging of suspects, would not suffice. And, crucially, the government had not adequately shown why the detention regime applied only to foreign terror suspects. As Lady Hale, one of the judges, pointed out, the logical inference was that some other, less drastic way had been found of managing the threat posed by British suspects. And if it wasn't necessary to detain British suspects, it was hard to see why it was necessary to detain foreign but equally dangerous suspects. The majority therefore concluded that the extrajudicial detention of foreign suspects had not been shown to be a necessary response to the public emergency evidence by the 9-11 attacks. To many people, this conclusion came as a real surprise, not because the government's argument wasn't weak, but because the court was prepared to recognise that weakness and condemn the government's position. Why was this surprising? Because previously, courts had almost invariably been extremely differential to the government on matters of national security. In other words, they had generally been unwilling to second-guess the government when it asserted that some step or other had to be taken in order to uphold national security. And yet here, in the Belmarsh case, the House of Lords adopt quite a different approach. The explanation, or at least a large part of it, lies in the Human Rights Act 1998. That act equips, indeed, requires the courts to examine government decisions and acts of parliament for compliance with human rights standards. And whether courts find that those standards have not been met, the act entitles them to say so. So when, in the Belmarsh case, the government argued the court should, in effect, mine its own business and leave the government to get on with protecting national security, the court had a clear and straightforward response. Things had changed. As Lord Bingham put it, the Human Rights Act gives the courts a very specific, wholly democratic mandate to uphold human rights. In other words, courts will no longer exceed to the argument that national security is none of their business, at least not when human rights are at stake. The Human Rights Act makes this the court's business. Here, then, we see a shifting in the tectonic plate of the Constitution as a degree of power shifts from parliament and the government on the one hand to the courts on the other. And that change in the bigger picture has profound consequences for ordinary people, like the Belmarsh detainees, who find themselves, for the first time, able to challenge the balance that parliament has chosen to strike between the rights of individuals and the perceived interests of what it is hiding.