Have human rights become a victim of the so-called War on Terror? Two recent developments would suggest that this has in fact happened.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), based in Geneva, is one of the world's oldest and most important human rights organizations. In response to the perceived growing threat to human rights arising from how governments reacted to the "9/11" attacks on September 11 2001, the ICJ created a panel to examine the situation.

The Report has been published this week: "Eminent Jurist Panel Report on Terrorism, Counter-terrorism and Human Rights"  Read it here:" EJPReport on terrorism.pdf". There is also an executive summary from the same website. It is bound to become one of the leading documents on this subject.

The Eminent Jurists travelled to a number of countries to hold public hearings. One of their first locations was Sydney (I am the NSW Chair of the ICJ Branch) and Australia is one of the countries covered by the report.

The overall findings and recommendations note, among other things, that terrorism is a reality and should not be under-estimated. But governments may have over-reacted to it. There is therefore a need to conduct a review of the emergency legislation that has been introduced in recent years. Many governments are reneging on their human rights treaty obligations. Criminal law should be the primary vehicle with which to address terrorism.

I might add that that last point has been a major - if unpublicized - difference between the US and UK. President Bush talked up the threat of terrorism, not least with that silly phrase "War on Terror" (in effect a war on a form of war). This may make a good public relations phrase but it is quite meaningless in military terms. The British approach - who have had four decades of fighting the IRA and other terrorists in Northern Ireland - has been to downplay the size of the problem. Captured terrorists wanted "prisoner of war" (POW) status - but the British only called them common criminals. To give them a military status would be to add to their political status. To over-emphasize the risk of terrorism is to do the work of the terrorists for them; their motto in effect is: kill one and scare a million.

The Eminent Jurists go on to warn that many laws and policies post-9/11 (such as indefinite detention without trial and the militarization of justice) have been tried and tested in the past , often without much success. Additionally often counter-terrorism measures alienate particular communities whose support is essential for counter-terrorism action.

Coincidentally the Eminent Jurists received support from an unlikely source: the former Head of Britain's MI5. MI5 deals with the internal threats to UK security (James Bond works for MI6, which deals with the external threats). Dame Stella Rimington was the first female Head of MI5 (1992-6) and has just been interviewed by a Spanish newspaper (with the interview being widely reported in the British media).

Dame Stella has reached much the same conclusion as the Eminent Jurists on the limitations - if not dangers - of much of the counter-terrorist legislation. The clampdown on civil liberties, for example, has added to the recruitment of the suicide bombers she claimed.

Despite all these warnings, I am not very optimistic. Some of my concerns are set out in my new book "All About Terrorism" (Sydney: Random House, 2008). First, there is now a "terrorist-industrial complex" (derived from President Eisenhower's 1961 warning of the "military-industrial complex") of people whose jobs depend on the rest of the community being scared of the risk of terrorism. An outbreak of peace would make them unemployed.

Second, the actual risk of terrorism is small. In my book, I do a comparison of the risk of terrorism for the average American. For example, the average American has a greater risk of dying from food poisoning than from terrorism. But somehow the threat of terrorism is more scary.

Third, the War on Terror is open-ended. How do we know when it has finished? It is different from, say, World War I or World War II, when we knew what had to be done to achieve victory (eg defeat the Kaiser/ Hitler). How can we define "victory" this time? It would have been far better to identify particular enemies eg Osama bin Laden.

The Eminent Jurists and Dame Stella have done a very useful service in reminding us of the long-term consequences of the short-term emergency measures introduced following 9/11. We are going to be haunted by those temporary measures for many years to come.