Nice column by Henry Porter about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko…

Casino Royale, which opened in Moscow last week, features an assassin operating on foreign soil with impunity and deniability, yet also with the undoubted backing of his government at home. The British do this in the movies; the Russians appear to be doing it for real. If they are, it constitutes state-sponsored terrorism because a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity represents a considerable threat to others. This is quite apart from the revolting, calculated cruelty of his murder.

Litvinenko courted death and knew that living in Britain would not protect him. There have been too many downed helicopters and unsolved murders across Europe for that. He must have known that more than 20 journalists have lost their lives in the former Soviet Union since Putin came to power. But, not content with having accused the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), of planning to murder exiled financier Boris Berezovsky, and being tried on corruption charges as a result, he stuck his head out by accusing the FSB of masterminding explosions in 1999 which killed some 230 people and allowed Putin to go to war in Chechnya.

He was tried and convicted in his absence for abuse of office, a purely Soviet catch-all charge; his family was hounded by the FSB and he was told that his life was in danger. But still he continued to make allegations, most recently at the Frontline Club in Paddington, London, where he condemned Putin for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He stood in the club’s upstairs room making his points without emotion, waiting patiently for his translator to finish…

Henry’s right: Russia is, in fact, a rogue state — a corrupt autocracy. What happened to Litvinenko was state-sponsored terrorism (captured nicely by that phrase about “a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity”). But Russia won’t — can’t — be treated as a rogue state. For one thing, it has nukes. For another, it’s where we have to get our gas (and maybe oil) from in the future. What surprises me at the moment is why the government isn’t making the link between energy policy and national security. Doing something serious about carbon emissions is also just about the best way of reducing the UK’s dependence on vicious despots like Vladimir Putin.

Martin Kettle’s column alterted me to something I had missed — a lecture given to the Cambridge Law Faculty on November 16 by Lord Bingham, Britain’s most senior judge, in which he set out the eight criteria that a society has to meet if it is to be said to be obeying the rule of law. It’s a fascinating and sobering read — sobering because he implies that the current UK government doesn’t understand what the rule of law requires.

Bingham’s starting point is the way the phrase “the rule of law” has become debased by casual over-use. “It is true”, he says

that the rule of law has been routinely invoked by judges in their judgments. But they have not explained what they meant by the expression, and well-respected authors have thrown doubt on its meaning and value. Thus Joseph Raz has commented on the tendency to use the rule of law as a shorthand description of the positive aspects of any given political system. John Finnis has described the rule of law as “[t]he name commonly given to the state of affairs in which a legal system is legally in good shape”. Judith Shklar has suggested that the expression may have become meaningless thanks to ideological abuse and general over-use: “It may well have become just another one of those self-congratulatory rhetorical devices that grace the public utterances of Anglo-American politicians. No intellectual effort need therefore be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter”.

Jeremy Waldron, commenting on Bush v Gore in which the rule of law was invoked on both sides, recognised a widespread impression that utterance of those magic words meant little more than “Hooray for our side!”.

Well, hooray for Lord Bingham, say I! It’s a terrific lecture.

An audio recording is also available — see here.