Anti-& counter-terrorism and Human Rights in Europe - 5 snapshots of current controversies - Grand Format

This report is central for political scientists and international relations experts and jurists who work with them. It explains the core of human rights as embedded in European and international law to which states have committed themselves. Part of that commitment has been the empowering of individuals to claim their human rights through national court systems with final recourse to the supranational courts.
This report dismisses the notion that human rights are simply about moral arguments, discourses of politicians, adjustable at the will of sovereign state authorities, and thus constituting a quagmire for justifying coercion. A misunderstanding of the `force of the law' in human rights has often blocked any truly transversal approach by setting up a false opposition : political science as a cynical vision of the world against a normative one inherited from moral philosophy and human rights.
Both are rejected here in order to show how human rights laws and critical security studies can dialectically work together to build the framework for a democratic approach to anti- and counterterrorism.