Assessing Damage, Urging Action 2. Are past experiences relevant to today’s counter-terrorism efforts? The Panel recognises the need to avoid simplistic analogies: each situation needs to be understood in a specific historical, legal and social context. Nevertheless, having listened to extensive testimony, the Panel is convinced that past experiences can provide useful lessons in a number of ways. 2.1 The exceptionalism argument The Panel heard extensive evidence to the effect that most, if not all, past terrorist threats have been portrayed as exceptional and unprecedented. As is the case nowadays (see Chapter One), authorities frequently argued in the past that the threat was unparalleled, and that “exceptional” responses were therefore required. Whether or not this was genuine, the exceptional character of the threat was almost always cited as justifying a departure from the normal legal processes. On the basis of the exceptional threat, special laws were introduced and/or the authorities resorted to extra-legal means. The evidence all tended towards the conclusion that the past notion of an exceptional and unprecedented threat, apparently necessitating special measures, had a negative impact on the protection of human rights and the rule of law. Human rights violations in many countries around the world seemed to stem directly from the argument that exceptional responses were needed. More positively, witnesses also testified to successful strategies evolving from failed policies in the past.27 However, a doctrine of exceptionalism logically leads one to dismiss or side-step such successful strategies, as supposedly irrelevant in the “new” environment. So the exceptionalism doctrine is problematic in that it risks justifying the introduction of unacceptable counter measures and it risks blinding governments to positive measures that have worked in the past, and might work again. 2.2 Back to the future? In some Hearings the fear was expressed that this tendency to ignore the past was having a deleterious effect nowadays. Governments in countries that had relatively recently emerged from authoritarian rule were coming under international pressure to introduce security legislation similar to laws that had led to human rights violations previously. The risk of regression was a point made, for example, by numerous participants at the Southern Cone Hearing (in Argentina). Witnesses argued that new terrorist 27 Experiences of successful policing strategies and police reforms from Northern Ireland for example could be directly relevant for current discussions about policing and minority communities. 27