Does one betray or does one defend Western values by allowing those committed to destroying them to be exposed to practices that are anti-Western?

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, in an address next week to the London Muslim Centre is the latest leading figure to venture into the controversial waters of this question — after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, in February — which can only be good. As David Pannick, QC, then wrote: “The answer to extreme ideas is more discussion, not less.”

In other words, is there a place for Sharia in Western jurisprudence? Or for torture, bugging, rendition and military tribunals for extremists or even for both British human rights and anti-terror legislation, whose provisions appear to be in conflict?

The philosopher Rousseau writes in The Social Contract in 1762 that institutions created by and for one population break down if exposed to human groups that behave in a different way. As we have seen in Britain, the law is only half the law. If it is humane, its mildness usually depends, not on its own merits, but on the virtues of a pre-existing homogeneous population. The law presumes the innocence not only of the accused, but also of society. With mass immigration society has changed and anti-terror legislation that worked with native Irish wrens has proved incapable of containing Islamic cuckoos. In effect, “wrenland” has become “cloud-cuckoo land” by default: tyrannical laws have had to be imposed on everyone.

In Britain we talk constantly of “respecting diversity”, but diversity is precisely what we do not respect. We often do not respect that different ideas, peoples, ways of being are indeed different. Our “anti-racism” laws and culture rest on the racist assumption that every culture can be extrapolated from, and reconciled to, our own. But if desirable, how far is this practically possible?

John Wadham, legal director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was quoted in these pages last October as saying that everyone has a claim to protection under the UK’s human rights laws. Apparently abolishing more than 1,000 years of English common law and the Roman civil law that obtains in Scotland — both of which sharply distinguish between the rights of natives and of strangers — Wadham implied that, regardless of whether British citizens or not, and regardless of agenda or behaviour, every human being must be allowed to enforce an access to British rights.

Similarly, Pannick argues forcibly for granting limitless Western freedoms to jihadis, freedoms created with a very limited and very different section of humanity in mind. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that we are judged by how we apply those very freedoms, and that their essence and strength is tested when applied to our enemies — whether terrorist suspects or convicted prisoners. Curbing those rights to such people, runs the argument, would hand them a moral victory.

Yet equally, there is a case for saying that a legal and human rights regime that could reward native dissidents — or even native terrorists such as the IRA — with their own relative mildness is not going to cope with Islamic maximalists who could easily and quite soon detonate a “dirty” or biological device in a British city, killing thousands and bringing democracy and the economy to an instantaneous terminus.

Contrary to the fashionable and prevailing view, it can be also be argued that excluding Muslim suspects from Western rights (say at Guantanamo Bay) does not per se compromise Western standards of legality. Western legalism and liberalism were formulated in a different world, and experience has proved (especially in Britain) that attempts to integrate minority cultures into our rights-based system create clashes.

Take the recent case of the Sikh schoolgirl who wants to wear a bangle — a religious symbol. Her refusal to take if off has led to her suspension. Is the school right? Or the case of the Muslim woman refused a job at a hairdressers because she wore a headscarf: Bushra Noah accused the salon owners of religious discrimination after failing to land a job at an interview. A tribunal dismissed her claim of direct discrimination but awarded her £4,000 for injury to feelings.

At what point does tolerance become subjugated to political correctness? The line is a fine one and the challenge whether integration of minority rights can achieved without destroying the very rights-based system that underpins our democracy. A devolved system of Sharia for the settlement of some community disputes, as apparently advocated by the Archbishop in his lecture for the ongoing Temple lecture series, Islam and the Law, can work only to the extent that where there is a conflict of principles or values between Sharia and the liberal human rights-based culture of Britain, the latter must prevail.

Tolerance of other cultures is to be valued; but should not extend to allowing the customs of a minority to suppress or deny the rights of others. Let us hope the Lord Chief Justice agrees.

The author is a freelance writer

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