It is one thing to say that international human rights law may have posed a serious challenge to neo-realist theories of international law and international relations by maintaining the integrity of the right to be free from arbitrary detention and insisting upon the relevance of human rights norms in the ‘War on Terror’. It is quite another, however, to say that this matters in some way to how states behave. Neo-realist theory claims that international law is incapable of exerting an effective exogenous force on its own; that where international law will not recalibrate to fit the preferred vision of the hegemon, powerful states will simply withdraw from it until the crisis has passed or international law has gradually reshaped itself. While both the US and the UK have continued to participate in the institutions of international law and to engage with enforcement bodies, there have been some indications of a partial withdrawal. The US, for instance, intimated that the unfavourable conclusions of the Committee against Torture on detention of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere were beyond that Committee's remit and may have been inserted by people with a separate ‘agenda’. As a result, John Bellinger claimed that, although the US would not stop interacting with treaty enforcement bodies, the report ‘raise[s] questions about when we show up before the committee, prepare an enormous amount of material for them and they ignore it, whether that is . . . a productive use of our time’. In the UK, the Human Rights Act 1998 (incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights) has been repeatedly represented as an obstacle to required counter-terrorist action and, in the years leading up to the 2010 general election, there was much discussion about replacing or supplementing the Human Rights Act 1998 with a so-called ‘British Bill of Rights’. However, quite apart from the executive and the legislature, whose activities in relation to counter-terrorist detention in the ‘War on Terror’ we have already considered, the role of courts remains to be considered.