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As this web site and initiative are originating in Ireland very little will be written about this subject here. Of great interest, however, is any attempt to extradite any Irish citizen to the US using as reasons the war on terror, the war on drugs or the war on inappropriate sex. In the last instance witness the recent high-profile cases where it appeared that men may have been set up for political reasons, including one as this is being written that also has the war on terror behind it.

This is an excellent point to highlight the underlying human rights issues here. The US has the world's largest prison population. Outside of televised show trials it has a reputation for poor or indifferent defence attorneys, overbearing judges and draconian prison sentences and conditions. At the end of 2011, the US president signed the law allowing the indefinite detention of its citizens without trial.

Above all, although it originally signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights, it has refused to ratify it, so that appeals against it under this Convention are impossible, thus allowing it to practice the kind of cruel and unusual punishment forbidden under the UN Convention on Human Rights.

Many of its own intelligent citizens are now claiming that the American Constitution itself is now being ignored.

All this needs to be appreciated if one is to accept that we must counter any attempt through the courts of other countries, including Ireland, to prevent the extradition of any citizen, young or old, to the US.

The right to privacy

This is of particular importance to young people who need privacy to help their development as natural and healthy individuals. Privacy is not only a basic human need, it is protected by both the European and UN conventions on human rights. States in the West are using both the war on terror and the war on 'inappropriate' sex to erode our rights to privacy. The implications for couples are dealt with in the section on the war on sex, but the main war on terror issue discussed here is the growing demands of the state for increased surveillance.

One of the biggest threat to Ireland at present is that the authorities may try to follow the UK's current implementation of the new Big Brother surveillance laws, which will allow the police and the state to monitor every web site visited, phone call made, text and email sent and received for every citizen in the land. We need young people in particular to resist this, to make an issue out of it, to make it an election issue, to find ways around it - to take a stand and say enough is enough. Read what it could mean.

It is also feared that the UK's current criticism of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is an indication that it wants to withdraw its ratification of both the European and UN conventions on Human Rights.The US has refused to ratify the UN convention which means that it does not have to answer for breaches of human rights such as torture.

The new UK surveillance plans are already prohibited under both Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of the United Nations. The first says, "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence." The second says, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

While these European and UN protections are likely to remain in Ireland, Ireland has indicated its tendency to follow both the moral panics and the accompanying legislative creep of the other English-speaking countries, all of which, strangely, have tended to leap into Salem-type moral frenzies, while the rest of the world has been less easily provoked into following. One example here is Garda vetting of volunteers. Another is attempts to extend the criminalization of certain sexual activities such as the making of 'illegal images' to teenagers sending each other pictures and 'Romeo and Juliet' relationships. Both the war on terror and the war on inappropriate sex are serious platforms from which the state could launch an assault on the right to privacy of young persons.

Go to The war on sex

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