@NigelBiggar I made it clear (2nd tweet) that you don’t need to be a lawyer to avoid your mistake: you just need to be able to read a complex text with a bit of care. (A skill you’d think a professor of theology might have.)
@NigelBiggar And your attack is even more odd since your defence, that “a Supreme Court judge read my book”, is (on any view) an appeal to professional authority.
@NigelBiggar I actually explain my argument that you’ve misread the judgment. If you have a counter-argument (as opposed to an appeal to authority), please explain it.
@NigelBiggar I also make it clear that it’s entirely intellectually respectable to disagree with where the ECtHR lands in Al-Skeini. Many people (and many lawyers) do disagree with it.
@NigelBiggar But it isn’t intellectually respectable to misrepresent the Court’s reasoning to suit a wider anti-ECHR narrative.
@NigelBiggar Nor is it intellectually respectable to conflate, as you do, two separate possible human rights claims: (1) the claim that the ECHR obligation to (eg) secure the right to life applied to UK state agents at all; and
@NigelBiggar (2) the claim that the substantive content of that obligation is unaffected by the very difficult context in which those agents were operating.
@NigelBiggar Belief in (1) evidently is not the same as belief in (2): and if you are to make your “ECHR v prudence” argument in an intellectually honest way, you need to accept that while many human rights lawyers maintain the first, very few maintain the second.
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