Kevin Bonavia Articles

This week US President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, a
liberal-minded New York judge of Hispanic background as one of the nine
US Supreme Court Justices. This is likely to prove one of the most
important decisions that Mr Obama will ever make, as the US Supreme
Court has the final say on laws governing vital social issues, such as
abortion or gay marriage. And Associate Justice Sotomayor is likely to
remain in her post for many years after Mr Obama has left his.

Last weekend I was in Glasgow East to help with Labour’s byelection campaign. This is the area that my mother’s family had come from, a combination of Scots Presbyterians and Irish Catholics for whom the shipyards provided reliable work and a half-decent living.

Like many towns and communities across the country, Southend marked
Veterans Day on 27 June with public displays performed by serving
members of the armed forces and ceremonies centered on veteran members.
But these public acts of recognition are not known by everybody. This
country still has an awkward attitude towards its military personnel.
Unlike other Western democracies, the civilian population is largely
unaware of what the armed forces actually do and – as shown by some
recent, notorious examples – there are increasing incidents of public
abuse of personnel in uniform.

A few days after the Court of Appeal ruled that Lotfi Raissi, a
pilot wrongly accused of training 9/11 hijackers, could sue for
compensation, I was told by a Southend resident that this was an
example of how we were all a lot less safer because of the Human Rights
Act: ‘Who is it this law is trying to protect, is it the criminals or the
rest of us?’

We briefly discussed Raissi, how he had
nothing to do with 9/11, but was jailed, condemned as a terrorist and
could never again fly as a pilot. He was at the wrong place at the
wrong time. If the Human Rights Act had eventually saved him, it could
be a safeguard for all of us. But convincing people that the Human
Rights Act is about all our rights as opposed to the criminal rights
charter that the tabloids would have you believe isn’t exactly easy.
The person I had spoken to agreed that the Human Rights Act might have
been a good thing in Mr Raissi’s case, but I couldn’t say that she
would agree with me that it is one of our most necessary laws for
protecting our way of life.