UK's "extraordinary rendition" of French national

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A topic from Skills, Talents & Leisure: History

laresSun 16/10/11 11:42

"On July 15th, 1815, after being defeated at Waterloo and deposed in Paris, the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte presented himself to Captain Frederick Maitland, commander of HMS Bellerophon, which was blockading the exit from Rochefort on the French Atlantic coast. This peaceful surrender precipitated one of the most complex and unresolved issues in British law and politics. In modern parlance, the British were faced with the prospect of making Napoleon the subject of ‘extraordinary rendition' – the extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another that recently characterised President George W. Bush's war on terror. The problem was that sympathy for Napoleon in Britain – boatloads of far from hostile sightseers hailed him as he walked on Bellerophon's deck in Plymouth Sound – meant that it would be risky to deal with him legally in the courts and just as risky to defy public opinion and treat him summarily and probably unlawfully.

Napoleon had certainly been ‘seized and detained', in the words of the standing order to all British naval captains. But in what capacity was he held? Was he a prisoner of war? He had certainly led French armies against Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain, but he had no formal status. He might simply be regarded as an ‘outlaw', as he had been denounced by the Congress of Vienna after he escaped from exile in the island of Elba in February 1815, thus violating the Treaty of Fontainbleau which had placed him there. As he had been previously recognised by his enemies as Emperor of France, could he be said to have become a fugitive rebel against his own regime? Perhaps, as one legal precedent suggested, he could be regarded simply as a ‘vagabond' and taken up for disturbance of the peace with no rights to legal trial or appeal anywhere in Europe."

"Such were the complex and urgent problems confronting the Liverpool government and its law officers the moment they heard that Maitland was bringing Napoleon back to Plymouth. They were determined to prevent Napoleon's numerous sympathisers from getting him ashore and laying his case before an English court. It is difficult to imagine that, after the Terror and after the long war that had just ended at Waterloo, there was any sympathy for Napoleon. In fact, the Whig opposition, led by Lord Holland, had been a ‘peace party' for years and – in a country which was barely democratic – there was still a vociferous radical ferment expressed in newspapers and demonstrations that broke through the repressive measures of the Tory government. "

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