Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to discuss why I think that United States policy should not hold universal human rights in higher regard than everything else when it comes to questions of national security. I intend to structure this debate by using the articles within the universal decleration of human rights that I feel can and indeed should be reconsidered in grave instances.
Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
The US policy for using torture in order to ascertain information is no secret. Put simply, the effectiveness of this can be quite easily shown. US intelligence on the Taliban's motives is significantly better than that of the British, who have comparable technology, by and large. The only difference is that US use torture to ascertain where key strongholds invisible to satellites are, and the British don't. The percentage of American soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan is somewhere in the vicinity of 1.8%, the percentage of British soldiers killed is 2.3%. It may look small, but that .5% is 275 American lives saved by breaching this article. A utilitarian approach would say the torture of maybe 20 enemy captives is probably a lesser evil than 275 allied dead.
Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Again, this is one with a president of being broken and working. If somebody is suspicious, then it is only right that they are checked out by the intelligence services. In 2006, based soley on suspicions raised by grocery shopping, meetings in parks and other such mundane surveillance, British police were able to arrest 25 people for plotting to bomb 7 transatlantic flights with liquid explosives. This would have killed 3,000, but it didn't. The hampering of these 25 men's privacy led to 24 of them being convicted on about 3,000 counts of attempted murder. This in itself was one of the most effective police operations ever, and was brought about by this breach of human rights.
Article 13
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country
One with a precident, but one I will answer with a rhetorical question first. Should you let someone who has made repeated visits to countries were extremism is commonplace freely travel around your country, if they have suspicious movements towards airports or train stations? In 2004, there was a lot of highly suspicious activity in Spanish train stations. The suspected groups were ignored, and the threat, although common knowledge was ignored. Just a few months later, the Madrid train bombings killed almost 200 people.
In short, if someone has suspicious travle habits, then their movement should be restricted in the interest of national security. If they are able to give a reasonable account of their movements, then they get their freedom back.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
A very controversial one. The freedom of opinion and expression is something that needs to be safeguarded, but what happens when that expression incites racial hatred. I'm talking about radicals here, like Abu Hamza as well as neo-Nazis and members of the KKK. It is in the interest of national security that tensions are not unecessarily increased, and to that end I suggest that the muting of people trying to do so is a necessary breach of this human right.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
What does that say? It says that people can't hide behind the decleration as a means to committing attrocities essentially. The things set forth, such as giving a right to security is set forth by the decleration, cannot be ignored, and then later hid behind by those who ignored it.
That wraps up my opening argument for why I think that the US should be able to bend the human rights rules in the interest of national security, and I await my opponents response.
