For all its labyrinthine progress through two magistrates courts, the High Court and the House of Lords, and for all Jack Straw's insistence that he has acted throughout in a quasi-judicial capacity, the detention of General Augusto Pinochet was essentially a political act. Nobody can doubt that a Conservative government would have ignored the Spanish magistrate's extradition request and let the general go. The Home Secretary's provisional decision (it was still "subject to representations" as we went to press) to send the ex-dictator home must also be regarded as a political one. At the age of 84, General Pinochet is clearly in poor health. But we cannot judge the sense of Mr Straw's decision because the medical reports remain secret. (Why? Mr Straw could easily have made their public release - or at least their release to the lawyers acting for such bodies as Amnesty International - a condition of the examination.) Are we really supposed to believe that a man who gave a quite coherent newspaper interview last July cannot now follow court proceedings? If he is unfit to stand trial, why is he fit to travel to the other side of the world? Why, most importantly, could the decision about his fitness not be left, as it would be in any other case, to the courts either in Britain or in Spain?
Without plausible answers to these questions, we must assume that Mr Straw took a pragmatic decision: that, after 16 months, the affair had gone on long enough and that a point had been made. He faced two risks: first, that the courts would finally decide in favour of the general, on medical grounds or otherwise; second, that the general would die on British soil, an outcome that hardly bears thinking about, with a gimlet-eyed, finger-wagging Lady Thatcher never off our television screens and a flag-draped coffin leaving the country accompanied by a military escort, solemn music and a lachrymose Norman Lamont. Either way, the Pinochet camp would have enjoyed a propaganda victory and many of the benefits gained from his detention might have been cancelled out.
What are those benefits? First, the general has been, on his own admission, humiliated, not least because he can only get home by pleading that he has taken leave of his senses. His detention in a luxurious Surrey mansion cannot begin to compare with the unspeakable treatment meted out to the opponents of his regime; but it goes some very small distance towards justice and, given that the Spanish judicial authorities were never going to attach electrodes to his testicles in any event, it is almost as much as his victims could realistically hope for.
Second, the people of Chile have lost their fear of the ex-dictator. They have seen him reduced to a pathetic old man, pleading, after his fashion, for mercy. They have seen the odium and contempt with which the world regards him. They have seen that only a small minority in their country still professes admiration for him.
Third, the principle has been firmly established that tyrants are answerable for their actions. It is easy now to forget that this concept is entirely new (except in the aftermath of war) and that the initial reaction to General Pinochet's detention was one of amazement as well as delight. Along with the international courts, the British courts have made it clear that future deposed tyrants - and perhaps ruling ones, too - will at best be international pariahs, at worst fugitives from justice. Since every ruler is apt to believe that his (or hers) will be a thousand-year Reich, this may not prove a great deterrent to tyranny; but it will nevertheless be of comfort to those millions who still fight for freedom.
Fourth, the episode has reminded us that our own liberties may not always prove as inviolate as we think. In their defence of General Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher and her cronies have looked like a lunatic fringe. Their argument that the general deserved kindly treatment because he had been a "friend" to Britain during war was laughable; he was no friend to Sheila Cassidy and William Beausire, two British citizens tortured by the general's agents. But, more alarmingly, it became clear that Lady Thatcher and her circle - people who ruled Britain in the not very distant past - not only excused but largely approved of what General Pinochet had done. In their eyes, anything was allowed in the war against socialism and the mission to protect the market. Theirs is the morality of conviction politicians and their conduct over the past 16 months shows us that these can be very dangerous animals indeed.
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