Assessing Damage, Urging Action It is particularly urgent to re-assert the absolute prohibition on the use of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, a principle that long went unquestioned but one which now needs renewed affirmation. The Panel was made aware at numerous Hearings that torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment flourishes all too easily when key safeguards such as access to lawyers, the courts, and the outside world are denied. Perhaps the most emblematic example of this occurred in the treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib, but participants at the Hearings in Pakistan and in the Russian Federation also expressed serious concern about the fact that people suffer serious human rights violations when they are placed beyond all basic protection.141 The testimony gathered about such violations in the past in Northern Ireland and in the Southern Cone is a further reminder that States must take adequate precautions if they are not to permit or indeed encourage ill-treatment. The US has a major role to play in rolling back the damage done by its treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, but it is clearly not alone. It was particularly disturbing to learn in many Hearings that governments in other parts of the world are relativising or justifying their own wrongdoing by comparisons with the US. There is also the risk that countries opportunistically re-define long-standing internal armed conflicts as part of the worldwide contemporary threat from terrorism, and the Panel was given several examples of this in its Hearings, particularly in Colombia.142 Elsewhere, the Panel learnt of the impact of international cooperation for the purposes of intelligence-gathering and sharing, and of the alleged complicity of numerous States in practices such as extraordinary renditions. The war paradigm has had a global impact, and needs to be repudiated by all. The Panel shares the view expressed by the ICRC and others that existing humanitarian law adequately takes account of issues of terrorism in armed conflicts. It has been, in our view, rightly emphasised that new legal rules are not needed, but better respect for, and strict compliance with, existing law. The Panel concurs with the view of the International Bar Association’s Task Force on International Terrorism that, “Suggestions that international humanitarian law is no longer relevant to situations involving terrorists, together with a failure to abide by its principles, only serves to undermine the binding force of international humanitarian law.” 143 Others also argued that we ignore history at our peril. This Chapter addressed a “new” phenomenon, the characterisation of the counter-terrorist strategy as a “war” on terror and the flawed argument that the laws of war applied. In many other regards, however, the war paradigm is little more than a resurgence of past (failed) 141 See for example serious allegations of secret detention, enforced disappearances and torture were encountered in other Hearings, in particular in the Russian Federation (in respect of Chechnya) and Pakistan. 142 See summary of the EJP Colombia Hearing. 143 See International Bar Association’s Task Force on International Terrorism, “International Terrorism: Legal Challenges and Responses”, Hotei Publishing, Washington D.C., 2004, p. 93. 65