Put to rights

Lord Steyn is one of the big beasts of the UK’s legal jungle. He played a key role in assimilating the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) into domestic law after the coming into force of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998). In 2003, he delivered one of the great judicial lectures: Guantanamo Bay: a legal black hole. He recently went back into action on identity cards.

Any speechwriter would find it hard to return to the heights of the Guantanamo speech. It was the right subject, from the right author, at the right time. He progressed through US wartime litigation over Japanese internees, the post-war growth of the human rights movement, the impeachment of the First Earl of Clarendon in 1667 to arrive at the problems facing the US courts in asserting jurisdiction over prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. It was judicial; it was historical; it dealt with the jurisprudence: it was devastating.

Identity cards, however, exist in a political black hole—rather