Spectator's Notebook
WHAT was the Observer up to on Sunday when it attacked the International Com- mission of Jurists for its scarifying report on police methods in Cuba? Torture, faking of evi- dence, persecution of defence witnesses and lawyers, inhuman disciplinary penalties, and all the other horrors which follow when the rule of law is set aside: why did the leader-writer avert his eyes from such details, commenting loftily that 'Throughout the Castro period there has been a state of emergency which would entitle any country to derogate temporarily from some of its obligations to uphold the principle of human rights implicit in the rifle of law,' and going on to suggest that the Commission, by revealing the atrocities, is 'fast becoming an instrument in the Cold War'? Presumably it was a joke, if in doubtful taste; a parody of the usual complacently high-minded attitude of non- alignment. It could scarcely have been deliber- ately designed to remind us of the attitude of the Cliveden set to uncomfortable revelations about the Nazi concentration camps.
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