ABSTRACT
States of emergency tend to be nasty, brutish and long. Nasty, because they typically entail the suspension of constitutional guarantees; brutish, because they are almost always associated with significant human rights violations;1 and long, because governments, having once equipped themselves with wide-ranging powers, are loath to see them lapse. Not surprisingly, therefore, the phenomenon of emergency has attracted considerable interest in recent years, with a number of studies by intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and academic works focusing on the link between human rights abuses and such declarations.
