Justice & Law Quote by Stjepan Mesic

The line is built like a warning label: necessary, plainspoken, and easy to ignore until something goes wrong. Mesic, a Balkan statesman shaped by the wreckage of Yugoslavia and the hard-won mechanics of post-conflict democracy, isn’t offering an abstract civics lesson. He’s drawing a boundary around the one thing that “global” panic reliably tries to dissolve: limits on power.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Global response” sounds coordinated, responsible, modern. It also smuggles in the temptation of exceptionalism at scale: if the threat is borderless, then the measures can be, too. Mesic counters with “must not,” a moral imperative that refuses the usual security-state trade-off language. He’s not bargaining with rights; he’s insisting they’re non-negotiable.

The subtext is aimed at the post-9/11 era, when governments rushed to expand surveillance, detention, and executive discretion, often with public approval and minimal oversight. Mesic’s point isn’t that terrorism is overblown; it’s that counterterrorism can become its own kind of contagion, normalizing emergency tools that outlive the emergency. “Fundamental human rights and freedoms” is deliberately broad, a catch-all that covers the obvious (due process, speech, privacy) and the politically inconvenient (the rights of suspects, migrants, minorities).

Coming from a leader associated with a region where “security” has been used to justify repression, the sentence reads as both principle and memory: democracies don’t usually collapse in a single coup; they erode through permissions granted in fear. Mesic is asking the world to fight terrorism without borrowing its logic.