Media and legal roles debated at Bar Council

The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, argued that journalists and lawyers need the support of democratic society and government in order to vindicate citizen's rights, last night.

He made the comments at a debate organised by the Bar Council on the influence of lawyers and the media, entitled: "Civil liberties: neither wig nor pen vindicates the rights of men".

He commented that a free media and democracy were interdependent and both were necessary in order to protect citizens.

Mr McDowell was supported by Ivana Bacik, the Reid professor of criminal law at Trinity College, who argued that civil liberties were won by popular movements and power struggles rather than by pamphlet writers and law practitioners acting on their own.

She said society needed to be careful to protect such liberties from terrorists behind atrocities such as the London bombings, who sought to prompt governments into rowing back on citizens' freedoms.

Opposing the motion, the Paris correspondent of The Irish Times, Lara Marlowe, argued that intensive press coverage had forced western governments to intervene in areas such as Kurdistan, Somalia and Sarajevo.

"Slobodan Milosevic committed a veritable genocide against some 200,000 Bosnian Muslims, but had journalists not risked their lives to cover it, I fear our politicians would have allowed it to continue," she said.

"The contention that journalists do not defend human rights is so outrageous that one feels almost weary in setting out to debunk it. Worse still, it is an insult to the memory of colleagues who have sacrificed their lives so that you could enjoy the right to information," Ms Marlowe said.

She was supported by US-based lawyer Ed Hayes, who said freedom depended directly upon the often-selfless sacrifices of people such as lawyers and journalists.