Amnesty International’s report coincides with the 60th anniversary of a famous telegram. Writing from Moscow on 22 February 1946, the diplomat George Kennan painted for his masters in Washington the classic picture of the vast scale and sinister character of the postwar Soviet threat. But he concluded on a note of caution. “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society,” he declared. The greatest danger was that “we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping”.
Today’s British government would do well to heed that advice – and to bear in mind how its distant predecessor the Attlee government responded to the Soviet threat and the insurgencies that challenged British global interests at the same time. That Labour government met the challenge by putting in place the modern system of international laws which determined that all persons, wherever they were, were entitled to minimum and fundamental rights. No one was to be cast into a legal black hole.
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