LONDON: One of Britain’s most eminent judges on Friday accused the British and US governments of whipping up public fear of terrorism, and of being determined “to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures”. Lord Steyn, one of the longest-serving law lords in Britain’s top court, the House of Lords, made the accusation while delivering his first public comments on the lords’ ruling in the Belmarsh case.

He was forced to step down last year from the panel of judges hearing the challenge to the lawfulness of detention without trial for foreign terrorist suspects after the government took exception to earlier remarks he had made on the subject.

Last December the law lords ruled by 8-1 that the detention without trial of foreign nationals in Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons and the Broadmoor high security hospital breached human rights laws. Lord Steyn’s remarks on Friday came a day after a damning report from the Council of Europe’s committee for the prevention of torture, which concluded that the treatment of some detainees “could be considered as amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment”.

He was giving the keynote address to an audience of judges and lawyers at the annual meeting in central London of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, whose chairman is Lord Bingham, the senior law lord. The session was chaired by the appeal court judge Dame Mary Arden. The audience included Lord Brown, another law lord, Judge Luzius Wildhaber, president of the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, Sir Franklin Berman QC, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned over the attorney general’s advice that the Iraq war was legal.

Lord Steyn hailed the Belmarsh ruling as “a great day for the law”, and “a vindication of the rule of law, ranking with historic judgments of our courts”. “Nobody doubts in any way the very real risk of international terrorism. But the Belmarsh decision came against the public fear whipped up by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom since September 11, 2001, and their determination to bend established international law to their will and to undermine its essential structures,” he said.

As far as he could ascertain, he said, the Belmarsh case was the first in which a government had sought, and managed, to change the composition of the panel of law lords due to hear a particular case.

The government, represented by the attorney general, argued that Lord Steyn should not sit on the case because, in a 2002 lecture, he had said: “In my view the suspension of article 5 of the European convention on human rights — which prevents arbitrary detention — so that people can be locked up without trial when there is no evidence on which they could be prosecuted is not in present circumstances justified.”

It was “a matter of speculation”, he said in a printed footnote to Friday’s lecture, whether the challenge to his right to sit on the panel for the Belmarsh case had been motivated by his 2003 lecture Guantánamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole. That lecture, in which he attacked the treatment of prisoners by the US at its base in Cuba as a “monstrous failure of justice”, drew headlines around the world.

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, argued in the Belmarsh case that the unelected judges had no democratic mandate and should defer in the sphere of national security to politicians who had been elected by the people. Lord Steyn said Lord Bingham’s judgment in the Belmarsh case, pointing out the “wholly democratic mandate” given to judges by parliament in the Human Rights Act, had contained the “most eloquent and magisterial rebuke” to an attorney general since Lord Denning quoted the words of Thomas Fuller: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service