As the erudite cadences of Michael Beloff cascaded across a near-full auditorium of the Bar Council, at last Sundays public lecture series hosted by the Human Rights Society of Malaysia (Hakam), the revenant ghosts of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Karl Popper were visible behind the rumpled locks, donnish spectacles and sinuous tones of the current president of Trinity College, Oxford.

Hakam had invited the Queens counsel to speak on Terrorism and Human Rights. Since Sept 11, hard-nosed sentinels of national security have sensed a wounded animal in the human rights lobby and are circling its carrion with delight.

Beloff, in Kuala Lumpur for a judicial accountability seminar, was pressed into extracurricular service by Hakam, to keep the vultures at bay and sustain the momentum given human rights consciousness in Malaysia by the events of another September  that of 1998.

Beloffs previous appearance in a Malaysian arena was in 1982 when he argued the famous Merdeka University appeal before a Federal bench.

Then he had draped his arguments for the university with the mantle of human rights before a court that dismissed them in favour of the this-is-not-good-for-national unity (read security) thesis of then Attorney-General Abu Talib Othman.

In an ironic postscript, 20 years after Merdeka Universitys judicial internment, Tunku Abdul Rahman University (Utar), successor of sorts to the former, is set to be launched. And Abu Talib may well be appointed chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (Suhakam)!

Nice Popperian touch here: the scientific and political theorist had argued that what happens in history is the largely unplanned and unforeseeable consequences of the actions of individuals.

If the ghosts of Karl Popper were being led an unlinear dance upon the Malaysian heath, the good fairies of Wendell Holmes nodded sagely as Beloff, at the Hakam lecture, presented a rapid survey of the evolution of national security legislation and judicial interpretation of those laws in Britain against the backdrop of gradual infusion of human rights covenants into the legal corpus over the past century and a half.

It was a survey that brought to mind the dictum of Justice Holmes, a leading light of the US Supreme Court in the first three decades of the last century that the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories ... have had a great deal more than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.

Telling observation

Clearly, Beloffs lecture was the product of much thought and writing. Although glints of personal opinion highlighted his survey, he maintained a scholars detachment in outlining the evolution of national security laws and their judicial interpretive history against the turbulent events that occasioned the adoption of those laws, even as human rights covenants spread across the legal plain.

Beloff made the telling observation that, invariably, when national security laws were promulgated, their architects were at pains to suggest these were temporary responses to exigencies. But history has shown this to be fallacious.

To paraphrase Wendell Holmes, the life of national security laws has a longevity that exceeds the felt necessities of the times when they were enacted. Worse, the dynamics of a legal Greshams Law seem to be at work: bad law, such as the suspension of habeas corpus or curbs on that right, driving out the good  untrammelled right to habeas corpus .

After an hours exposition in which Beloff had displayed impressive detachment, it took question time for him to abandon Mount Olympus and pad about its slopes. Nothing like a few concise, crystal questions to stir listeners out of the torpor a long lecture, even one as compelling as Beloffs, can induce.

He was asked whether a Malaysian styled Internal Security Act would have enabled the United States to prevent 9/11? While avowing his lack of technical competence, he said he felt the disaster was due to a failure of intelligence.

Should judges decide in favour of the detainee when security laws provide some latitude, however constricted?

Obviously, because the prized principle was justice and any ambiguity in the law should be interpreted in the detainees favour. Beloff was of the view that judges should not merely be plumbers; but protectors of the principle of justice.

What of suicide bombers?

Beloff said they were beyond the rule of law. He said if you take self-execution and the execution of others as an operating principle, you are beyond the parameters of civil society whose underlying principle was the protection of life and preservation of liberty.

You cannot legislate for character, how then is the legal-cum-judicial sphere to preserve it?

By appointing people who find the reasons for their conduct in, as Holmes put it, the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Beloff was agnostic about how to choose these people; but of their need of moral purpose and conduct, he left no doubt.

One left the Beloff discourse with an idea of what a good lecture ought to do: provide a stay of some duration against confusion.

J Terence Netto is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.