Harry Potter

Is this the unlikely face of a criminal? Shami Chakrabarti, human rights activist, director of Liberty and self-confessed Potter-head, believes that the boy-wizard commits a war crime in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of the Harry Potter books -- and she's stll wondering why J.K. Rowling permits the character to cross the line between good and evil. Shami Chakrabarti makes the claim in an intervew in today's Independent on Sunday.

It all comes down to the Crucio curse, one of three "Unforgiveable Curses" which Harry learns about at wizard school. Crucio is a curse which inflicts significant pain on another person, and, according to Shami Chakrabarti, "is proper torture and that fits with article 3 of the ECHR [European Convention on Human rights] ... It's just wrong."

In Deathly Hallows, an irrate Harry attacks Amycus, one of Voldemort's henchmen, with the Crucio curse simply because Amycus spits on Professor Minerva McGonagall, one of the hero's favourite teachers at Hogwarts.

I'm not sure if the ECHR applies in Harry's world, but Rowling usually follows the normal conventions of morality in keeping her positive characters on the right side of the ethical line. Has she gone too far on this occasion? Harry is certainly no Jack Bauer, but he has acted aggessively in this scene. By hitting out in anger with an "Unforgiveable Curse", he has committed a crime in his fictional world which, according to one of his teachers at Hogwarts, is punishable with "a life sentence in Azkaban", the wizards' prison.

I do not predict riots at bookshops, nor do I think we are likely to see lines of right-on children in protests calling for a war crimes tribunal to investigate the Amycus incident. But Shami Chakrabarti knows her law, and it looks like a fair cop. Harry Potter is a war criminal.