Liberty and security

Citation

Gearty, C. (2013). Liberty and Security. Polity Press. Themes for the 21st Century series.

Chapter Summary

This is a short argumentative book: seven chapters and about 115 pages of text, followed by notes and an index. It is an essay with a thesis, not a survey of the law. Gearty argues that the promise of universal liberty and security is contradicted by vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, by authoritarian regimes that hold regular elections, and by socio-economic deprivation hidden behind professed commitments to human rights. He calls the resulting world "neo-democratic": places that play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. He then sets out a vision of liberty and security open to everyone.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The opening chapter states the question: why do so many people aspire to liberty and security and so few enjoy them? It introduces the idea of neo-democracy, which the book applies to newer and long-established democracies and also to the United Nations.

Chapter 2: Struggling Towards the Universal

The chapter title points to the long struggle towards a universal conception of liberty. The book as a whole examines the historical development of liberty and security and their roles in democracy, and asks for whom the two have actually been available, contrasting universal liberty with a version limited to the few.

Chapters 3–4: The Global Stage; The Enemy Within

By their titles these two chapters move from the global to the domestic arena. Reviewers describe the book's account of security policy after 11 September 2001 and single out the part played by the United Nations Security Council, including targeted sanctions based on blacklists, and the way such measures were reinforced at national level with little regard for due process. The burden has fallen especially on minorities, particularly Muslims.

Chapters 5–6: A Very Partial Freedom; Cultural War

The titles indicate that freedom as actually enjoyed is partial and that the debate has a cultural dimension. Within the book's overall argument these chapters belong to the account of how inequality and the neo-democratic order have come about and are tolerated.

Chapter 7: Returning to Universals

The final chapter is the "manifesto" the publisher describes: a call for an egalitarian, universal conception of liberty and of security in the fullest, human sense, one in which the achievements of the democratic past are not discarded.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Framing the Argument

• Neo-democracy: a system in which liberty is enjoyed by the few and security by an elite, under a plausible framework that appears to guarantee democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms.
• Universal liberty: the idea that liberty must be available to everyone, not traded against the security of the nation.

Chapters 3–4: Security After 9/11

• National security versus human security: Gearty contrasts a narrow idea of national security with a deeper idea of human security.
• Targeted sanctions and blacklists: measures through which counter-terrorism was enforced internationally with little regard for due process.

Chapters 5–7: Inequality and Alternatives

• Egalitarian universalism: the book's positive proposal that liberty and security be conceived as a right of all and tied to the rule of law and respect for human rights.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear, compact thesis. The book argues one position from start to finish. Reviewers praised its sweep and focus: a review quoted by the publisher found it breathtaking that a 146-page book has so wide a sweep, and Stephen Sedley described a fluent account of whether liberty and security are necessarily antithetical.
• Links the legal and the political. The publisher describes it as drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science. The Times Higher Education review (Amanda Cahill-Ripley) found the approach original in connecting counter-terrorism to inequality and to the role of the UN Security Council.
• Written for a broad readership. The publisher says it is for students and scholars, journalists, policy-makers and the general reader, and its length makes it practical to assign alongside a core text.

Limitations

• An argument, not a textbook. The publisher presents it as a critique with a manifesto. Times Higher Education notes that conventional lawyers may find it controversial. It does not set out the doctrines, statutes and cases in the way a course text does.
• Universalist critique does not settle the hard cases. In the European Human Rights Law Review, David Cole agreed that many counter-terrorism measures rest on double standards, but argued that demanding universal protection does not answer when a targeted killing might be lawful, or how to preserve privacy against mass surveillance.
• Brief by design. Roughly 115 pages of text cannot treat any one country's law in depth; readers who need doctrine on detention, control orders or surveillance must turn elsewhere.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course list, Liberty and Security is a short essay with a strong thesis rather than a doctrinal text. For doctrine, Amos's Human Rights Law explains the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Convention rights through the case law, and Harris, O'Boyle and others' Law of the European Convention on Human Rights is the detailed reference on the Strasbourg case law. Gearty's own Civil Liberties gives the historical and theoretical introduction to the subject, and his On Fantasy Island turns to the Human Rights Act and its critics in Britain.

Read Liberty and Security after a first doctrinal course, or alongside it, as a counterweight that asks what rights are for and for whom. Wacks's Privacy: A Very Short Introduction complements it on surveillance, and Kavanagh's The Collaborative Constitution and Möller's The Global Model of Constitutional Rights pursue the structure of rights protection from different directions.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates in human rights, civil liberties, public law or politics, and general readers with an interest in counter-terrorism and democracy. The publisher aims it at general readers as well as students and scholars.

A practical plan:

• Read it straight through. At around 115 pages of text, the argument is cumulative, so reading in order is better than dipping in.
• Start with Chapters 1 and 7. These state the thesis and the proposal; read them first to know what the intervening chapters are building towards.
• Read Chapters 3 and 4 with primary sources beside them. Look up the Security Council measures and national counter-terrorism legislation the chapters discuss, and test the argument against them.
• Write a response. Use Cole's review as a model for a critical reply, and ask whether a universalist standard resolves the cases a course on counter-terrorism law raises.