46 Report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights to coercive treatment, protected the police against false allegations of ill-treatment, and maintained confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole.” 75 7. Conclusions & Recommendations: learning from the past What the Panel learned in its Hearings confirmed the findings of many previous reports on the impact of emergency measures on respect for human rights, including the ICJ’s own earlier work on this issue.76 Earlier studies meticulously examined the pathology of emergencies and their effects on the division of powers within the States concerned. The studies identified human rights violations stemming from these counter-terrorism and emergency measures. Twenty five years on from the ICJ report on the impact of emergency law, it is remarkable how many of the same criticisms were heard by the Panel. One finding in 1983, for example, was that human rights are at heightened risk of abuse, even in democratic States, when emergency powers are concentrated in the executive branch. In civil law countries, this phenomenon occurred with classic state of siege clauses which, when triggered, enabled the executive to govern by decree. In common law jurisdictions, the problem arose when the legislature delegated expansive regulatory powers to the executive. The effect in both scenarios was to weaken, marginalise or sometimes displace the legislative branch from exercising its normal functions, much less act as a check on the executive. During a crisis, particularly a crisis entailing terrorist violence, the executive, was often able to rely on a supine legislature to enact its proposals, defining new terrorist offences that were frequently over-broad, or so vaguely worded as to violate the principle of legal certainty. The study also noted that prolonged administrative detention of terrorist suspects at the behest of the executive was subject to little or no judicial control. Moreover, judicial independence was often compromised by the executive, whether because of the wholesale removal of judges; by suspending tenure and placing judges on probation; or by making judges subject to removal, at any time, and without cause. In other cases, the judges undermined their own authority in a variety of ways.77 The report records that even when the threat supposedly justifying exceptional measures subsided, or the formal emergency was lifted, many of these measures became permanently incorporated into the ordinary law. The Panel concluded on the basis of all of this rich material that: a. There is much to learn from past experiences of counter-terrorism measures. Simple analogies cannot be made across different decades and different 75 See CAJ final submission, p. 8. 76 ICJ, States of Emergency: Their Impact on Human Rights, op. cit. 77 ICJ, States of Emergency: Their Impact on Human Rights, p. 12 (Argentina), p. 185 (India), p. 238 (Northern Ireland) and p. 284 (Syria).