What a week its been for the ‘defenders of freedom’. Sovereignty has been restored in Iraq. The US Supreme Court has decreed that the Guantanamo Bay detainees are entitled to legal representa-tion. Saddam Hussein was produced in court in Iraq to be tried for crimes of genocide. The war against terror had delivered democracy to the Iraqi people and bourgeois law had prevailed over the will of Bush. All was right with the world.

Except that even a tentative scratch at the surface reveals another picture beneath. Iraqi sovereignty has come to mean the imposition of an unelected civilian administration on the people of Iraq. The extent of such ‘sovereignty’ is borne out by the opening of the trial of Saddam. The location of the court was kept secret. The judge insisted his own name be kept secret. There was no defence counsel. The videotaped proceedings were censored by the US military. Saddam was chained throughout, and most of his comments were censored to the media. To any impartial observer, justice in the new ‘independent’ Iraq looked about as impartial as the justice overseen by Saddam.

‘Sovereignty’ is a slippery concept. International law treats ‘sovereignty’ as a fundamental. Sovereignty and equality are governing principles in bourgeois law at every level. The legal theorist Lassa Oppenheim opined as far back as 1920 that the equality of states was “the indispensable foundation” of international society. When the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq it put forward its right to ‘self-defence’ as a justification for intervention. Yet the US was not under attack, as Article 51 of the UN Charter specifies as necessary for armed self defence. Afghanistan and Iraq, it was argued, had supported and harboured Al-Qaeda.

Yet when the Nicaraguan government attempted to pursue the US government over its support for the right-wing paramilitary Contras, the World Court held that the US was not responsible for breaches of international humanitarian law committed by the Contras since it had not directed and controlled the individual operations which gave rise to these breaches. “Organising or encouraging the organisation of irregular forces or armed bands … does not constitute an armed attack sufficient to give rise to a right to exercise self-defence.” Under the terms of the Military Assistance Agreement concluded between the International Security Assistance Force and the interim government in Afghanistan, the UK military forces operating in Afghanistan are immune from prosecution for grave breaches of the Geneva Convention. ‘Sovereignty’ appears to be honoured only in the breach. It is in the gift of some ‘Great Power’ nations to grant ‘sovereignty’ to others.

The same is true for the concept of ‘human rights’. Behind the rhetoric of formal equality, and immutability of rights lies a social terrain of real inequality and rights instituted or violated at the behest of the state. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay were deemed ‘illegal combatants’ by the US and hence denied the protections of the laws of war. The intervention of the Supreme Court remedies the situation, but the fact that a legal environment could be created wherein the US could contend that the law of human rights had no applicability goes to suggest that such rights are in any event no more than gifts of the state. So also the detainees held at HMP Belmarsh in the UK, indefinitely and without trial.

The Blair government’s vaunted introduction of the Human Rights Act – the recognition of the European Convention on Human Rights within UK law – counts for little given the ease with which the government was able to derogate from its Conven-tion duties in violating the rights of the Belmarsh detainees.

The lesson of all this? ‘Sovereignty’ and ‘equality’ are meaningless, the ‘rights’ intended to protect us useless, so long as they remain the gifts of the state. The only guarantees of sovereignty and equality can be through the destruction of the state and the system of fundamental inequality of which it is the armed guarantor. Those who argue that the means to equality and justice lie through the state have to explain how ‘sovereignty’ can be anything other than a game in the courts of international law, if it is something that can be granted or denied by those with the biggest guns.