Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880–1932)

Just a short time ago, a gentle soul called Spiro from my community was allegedly murdered by a man whose lawyer requested that he receive medical attention while in custody as he has schizoaffective disorder. It was yet another reminder that there is a tension between the risk of harm to members of a community, and the human rights of people at risk of acting in ways that compromise that community's safety.
As a general rule, we do not, in democracies, detain our citizens indefinitely because they might do us harm. Sometimes this principle has terrible consequences. 49 women were murdered in Australia last year in acts of violence, 28 of these at the hands of a husband or partner or ex intimate partner. And as Emily Maguire showed in her 2016 novel An Isolated Incident, (see my review) these murders are not isolated incidents, they are rarely a surprise and the perpetrator is known. Threats have been made but the law does not lock men up because they might kill the women they claim to love.
Sometimes the consequences are horrific. The 2009 Churchill fire that killed eleven people and caused catastrophic damage to property and the environment on Black Saturday was started by an arsonist. How do we reconcile the human rights of others and still protect ourselves and the environment from known arsonists during the bushfire season? They are rarely convicted and can't be imprisoned indefinitely anyway. (In 2012, the Churchill arsonist was sentenced to nearly 18 years gaol but was eligible for parole last year.) Award-winning Australian author Chloe Hooper explored this complex issue in The Arsonist (2018, see my review.)
Internationally, the detention of alleged terrorists without trial at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 remains a contentious issue. President Obama ordered it closed in 2009, but congress has refused funds for its closure. Wikipedia suggests that there are still 30 detainees, some of whom are held indefinitely or otherwise in 'law-of-war detention' and some of whom were charged in the 'military commissions system' and one who was actually convicted.

According to this US House of Representatives 2016 report:

According to the most recent statistics from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 204 out of the 676 released detainees are either confirmed to have reengaged or are suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities. Many of these detainees were thought to no longer represent a threat when they were released, yet they nevertheless returned to terrorism.

Since US politics are a mystery to me, it's hard to tell if this is a partisan sub-committee, but clearly, the devil is in the detail: how many of the 204 are confirmed to have re-engaged, and how many are suspected of it? More to the point, how does a society balance the security of its people with the human rights of people who might, or might not, pose a terrible risk to public safety? Some of the GITMO detainees have been there for a very long time without charge, but Islamic terrorism is real, costing thousands of lives.

These questions arose from my reading of this book, Time Stood Still (1931), by Paul Cohen-Portheim, which is about the cost to the individual who has been judged to be a risk to the safety of the community. It is a record of the experiences of a German interned in England during WW1. Whether he ever was or wasn't a potential spy or Fifth Columnist or a potential recruit for enemy forces is not the issue; what he describes is the effect of harmful detention on himself without charge for an indefinite period of time.

And this raises two questions for a thoughtful citizen: if his internment was as harmful as he says it was, was his experience also common to others in the same situation and was the harm that he says was done to him representative? And, if we accept that indefinite internment does do harm to internees, can it be justified in some circumstances?

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/26/time-stood-still-1931-by-paul-cohen-portheim...… (mehr)