Human Rights We Should Recognise

The recent riots have brought up a lot of commentary about the Human Rights Act, and Call Me Dave’s attack on the Act as contributing to the unrest. All this commentary seems to be from the point of view of the rioters, and the rights given under the act encouraging criminality and violence.

I want to look at the other side, my big gripe with European human-rights legislation. What I object to is not just the rights given that should not be rights, but also the fundamental rights that are not given; these also affected the course of the riots. Of course once the Human Rights Act was made law, it is often assumed that anything not included is not a human right.

The example here is the right to self-defence, including the right to keep and bear arms for this purpose.

For years the right of an Englishman to defend himself, his family and his property have been eroded. The change in this is discussed in an article on Powerline. The claimed reason, that we should rely on the police to protect us, has never been very sound. The police could never claim to be available at every time a man might need to defend himself, so the idea of abdicating this responsibility to the sanctioned authority was always ridiculous. The allegation that police are being told in cases of violent disorder to avoid arresting people and simply try to contain the situation makes it farcical.

Like any well-read lad I enjoyed reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a boy; most people have seen Sherlock Holmes on film and television. Does it not strike people that Watson frequently carried a revolver, as occasionally did Holmes? It was clearly unremarkable to Conan Doyle, and of course it was an assumption at that time that a man might carry a weapon, and defend himself with it. Crime was a lot lower then, around a tenth for more than half the population, for a crime rate of around 1/6 to 1/7 today’s.

In 1964 advice to police was that self defence was not a reason to allow a fire-arms certificate to hold a handgun. Between 1997 and 1998 handguns were banned altogether (high-calibre in 1997, .22 in 1998). Now we are not allowed to carry any weapon at all for self defence. There is no requirement for the police to even suggest that the person was a threat to anyone else. If a person carries a weapon, or anything that can be used as a weapon, without a good excuse he or she can be prosecuted.

Since then there have been increasing cases of police persecuting and prosecuting people who defend themselves. There are cases that should never have come to court, there are cases of arrests that never resulted in charges but still cause distress to people who have already suffered the trauma of attacks on themselves or their homes and businesses.

So where is the human-rights legislation to protect rights of crime victims from the Police, when the criminals receive so much protection?

Of course there are many other rights that are being stripped by the government and the EU, or rights one of us might argue for, but because they are not coded into the European Convention on Human Rights there is almost no chance that they will be recognised as human rights.

Recently there was a television programme about fake Euro notes. It is a strict-liability offense in the Euro-zone to even own fake Euro notes, and also to try to spend them. Yet there are millions of fake notes in circulation. Many people might have them completely innocently. At least one British person, unfamiliar in any case with Euros, tried to spend a single fake note in a large bundle he had directly from a travel agent, yet had he been charged his lawyers had said he was best to plead guilty, as he had no defence. That the Austrian police did not charge him was good sense from them, to his fortune. Not everyone has been so lucky, and a law that relies on luck and the good sense of officers is a poor law.

Where is the protection of our human rights to carry currency without worrying that we might inadvertently commit a serious criminal offence?

What about the one right on which all others, and our freedom and political rights depend, the the protection of our right to free speech? It is protected under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, with a few exceptions. One of which is protection of morals, another is maintaining the authority of the judiciary. Both of these exceptions are incompatible with what I would see as the human right to free expression.

Of course the UK libel laws are not compatible with natural rights to free speech, nor are the reporting restrictions on family courts, for example. So even our most fundamental right is not protected.

I could go on. Rights to privacy that Americans recognise in the fourth amendment to their constitution, right to free assembly, right to silence under police questioning (broken in the UK; if you disagree with my objection to the current British police caution of rights, I recommend this video "Don't talk to the police", advice from an American lawyer), rights to due process of law and against double jeopardy, rights to speedy trial.

All of these are rights recognised in the constitution of the USA, you will notice; the USA so criticised by sophisticated Europeans as the barbaric outpost of rednecks.

I would argue for other rights: the right to self determination, taken as far as euthanasia, the right to a proportional tax rebate if you choose supply from a third party of services currently offered by government, the right to freedom of choice to the degree that government cannot place extra taxes on products politicians feel we should use less (petrol, home energy and alcohol affect me, but tobacco is unfairly taxed too), and a few more radical libertarian positions. I am even willing to give credence to arguments in favour of right to use certain drugs that are currently illicit, although I am not a libertine and feel that more information is needed to decide on some of those issues.

There is even one right of criminals, to blind justice without considerations of motive (such as “hate crime”) or the victim’s wishes in sentencing. Both of these allow or encourage revenge, not justice.

So, not only does human rights legislation allow rights that are not natural human rights, especially to criminals and those who are not legally resident in this country, but by not mentioning certain rights, or by curtailing them in exceptions, it restricts the rights of the majority. This happens because when the British common law assumption that we have all rights that are not removed whether by historical precedent or by legislation has been supplanted by the European Convention on Human Rights.

Finally I believe that supplanting is unconstitutional. It is entirely at odds with British legal tradition, and if there is any one thing at the heart of the British constitution, tying together the various threads of our written constitution, it is legal tradition.

It’s Piracy All The Way

I am not one to begrudge paying a fiver for a good DVD, or even the extortionate price of a cinema ticket for the right feature. I like films, some of them quirky, some of them even Roman Polanski’s (Chinatown is one I could recommend). However with so much of Hollywood’s out-of-touch elite objecting to a child rapist serving his sentence, I cannot now decide who to boycott, and will have to simply watch illegal copies.

That list consists of people who favour the release of a man who has served not one day of his sentence (the 42 days he was incarcerated were for pre-sentence psychological evaluation). As far as I have read the sentence was never even pronounced.

The sentence, remember, relates to the admitted statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The remaining allegations were never tested in court because Polanski threatened to use his fame to intimidate the girl and her mother. In fact the decision to accept the plea to avoid a court appearance was the mother’s, and she was not blameless in pushing her daughter into the dangerous situation, and could expect to be ripped to shreds by the press.

However those remaining allegations, made under oath to a grand jury, indicate that Polanski got a 13-year-old girl drunk, drugged her and then raped her vaginally and anally. He raped her anally because she was not on the pill, so he did not want to ejaculate in her vagina. While untested, there is no reason to believe those allegations are false.

OK so Woody Allen has been crawling up his own backside since Sleeper, and I never saw the point of much of David Lynch’s weirdness (I am not against weird per se, some of my favourites are very odd; it is Lynch I cannot grasp). However it is a racing certainty now that any film one could buy will benefit someone on that list.

Therefore I will from now on be embracing and encouraging film piracy at every opportunity. I still want to watch interesting films, but I don’t want that to benefit apologists for a child rapist.

Entirely Predictable Consequences to Free Speech

I have written before about the unintended consequences, and the unspoken but intended consequences of laws, and especially of laws made in haste, made by an over-confident, bullying executive with a cowed legislative chamber or with weak or non-existent opposition.

The consequences of legislating against religious intolerance were not only predictable, they were widely predicted. Famously Rowan Atkinson and a few other comedians, making their living pointing out ridiculous pomposity of which religion can be a rich source, complained that such laws would be used to stifle entirely harmless and in fact important speech, including humour and debate.

Thus the charging of two Christians who are alleged to have argued with a Muslim guest should not be a surprise. It was not the stated intent of any law to criminalise entirely harmless disagreements, and the government at the time of the 2006 Religious Hatred Act’s progress denied that this would be the case. Worryingly the police did not even use this Act, although the same spirit is clear in the wording of the charges under the 1986 Public Order Act, an act intended to calm street disturbances, as being “religiously aggravated”. Are the police using the 2006 Act to guide their prosecution under the 1986 law, or are they making up the law as they go along? religious intolerance was not illegal in 1986, in fact I didn't think it was illegal now. Is this a generally accepted rider to a charge, and if so on what basis?

The Muslim woman in question might have been offended, but nowhere is it suggested she was threatened in any way. Where did anyone get the idea that a person has the right not to be offended? If freedom of speech is not the right to offend people then what is it? No-one objects to inoffensive speech, by its very nature, so its freedom need not be assured.

Incidentally I was reluctant to use the Daily Mail link above, due to the sometimes-justified reputation for over-the-top reporting, especially on this sort of issue. However after reading the Letter From A Tory about this my brief search only revealed one other national newspaper story. That was unsuitable because The Independent lied in the very first sentence that summarised the story, and lied in a way material to the events. Mr and Mrs Vogelenzang were not, as stated, charged with a racist offence.

Is the Independent simply incompetent? Does that incompetence show up some underlying tendency to see all politically-incorrect speech and action, from the most harmless to the most heinous as equivalent? Was this a deliberate attempt to make the Vogelenzangs look bad, and justify their arrest? It was at best farcical incompetence that should have been followed by a prominent apology and a sacking, at worst snide, disgusting, libellous dishonesty.

Trouble Smuggling Underage Prostitutes?

An age-old problem we have all faced at some time or another

ACORN can help you there too. Yes, it’s another ACORN video from the professional US media a journalism student and a guy she met on Facebook.

This time the ACORN employee is a lawyer, and since he was educated in Mexico James O’Keefe wonders if he can help with getting his illegal immigrant child prostitutes across the border. What do you think?

Giles and O’Keefe have used an interesting tactic against the socialists who they knew would leap to the support of ACORN. They only released a single video at first, and at that time did not really give any clue that there were more. This then looks like something ACORN can contain, and they do. However this commits them to a line of defence and also to the fact that something is seriously wrong in the office in question.

A couple more videos, and ACORN has a problem but one they think they can handle, so they come out with stronger defences, further committing themselves to a strategy. There is a hint that more videos will come out, leaving ACORN unsure but also committed by their previous response to actually firm up their defence.

Then the east-coast videos start coming out, saying slightly different things and the defence is suddenly all over the place, with wild, utterly unconvincing stories.

It is a tactic I have occasionally tried to use against socialists, but not often successfully. Socialism is an incoherent, self-contradictory philosophy. With that to draw on the left so often shade their views depending on what they are responding to (hence they often come out as hypocrites, e.g. Islam, gay rights and women’s rights)that to argue successfully you need to make them commit early on, before your own argument is out.

Miss Giles, Mr O’Keefe, my hat is off to you. Well done sir, miss.

ACPO Advises Breaking the Law

I have mentioned ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, before. It is an organisation I believe should be disbanded, and its officers charged with corruption if there is a law general enough to cover their actions, exposed in the press otherwise.

ACPO is not a government body, a QUANGO or even a staff association or union. It is a company limited by guarantee, answerable only to its guarantors. I can only assume it is specifically permitted to leave out the term “Limited” in its name. This is usually required, and leaving it out masks the nature of ACPO.

Now ACPO is advising senior police officers to break the law and keep DNA samples despite a court ruling. Now I disapprove of the European Court of Human Rights. I also disapprove of large tracts of human rights legislation that conveys rights, having seen no case that these rights are inherent. However police of all people cannot just go around obeying only those laws they choose to obey.

Of course there are solid arguments against keeping DNA of innocent people on a database. Political argument (it is unpopular), theoretical science (a large database is arguably less useful) and experience (it has rarely if ever been used to solve serious crime) argue against keeping such a large database.

Anticipating that new legislation on DNA retention will come into force next year, a letter from ACPO states

“Until that time, the current retention policy on fingerprints and DNA remains unchanged.

Individuals who consider they fall within the ruling in the S and Marper case should await the full response to the ruling by the Government prior to seeking advice and/or action from the police service in order to address their personal issue on the matter.”

Why is an unaccountable body making policy? Why is it doing so in secret? On what authority does ACPO determine what any officer ‘should’ do? Why moreover is an independent body coercing the police to break a court judgement?

Silencing Ben

It appears that there is an attempt to shut down the only voice of a serving convict in the blogosphere, Ben’s Prison Blog, about which I disagreed with A Tory. If you agree with me, or if you have not read it yet, please do visit the site to learn more about this potentially illegal effort to silence an intelligent, articulate voice.

Letter To A Tory

Letters From A Tory has a Letter today addressed to Prisoner Ben claiming very forcefully that Ben should not be allowed to author a blog.

Since Ben’s friend accesses the blog from outside prison there appears to be no practical way Ben could be prevented from blogging. I cannot think of any that would not curtail the the freedom to write letters, a freedom assumed thirty years ago when his ten-year minimum sentence was recommended on that basis. However not forgetting that I would like to disregard it and answer A Tory.

I saw no reason in anything in the post or comments that Ben should not be allowed to blog.

It is not, as implied in the Letter, an increase in Ben’s liberty, as he is using his traditional liberty to achieve it. There has always been heavy restriction on prisoners' communication, and this is no exception. I am sure we can all imagine the restriction of having to access the internet via a friend and the Royal Mail. Given that prisoners have never been entirely isolated blogging in this way is no real change to Ben’s liberty.

I would argue that blogging is an excellent medium for rehabilitation. In a good blog there must be an attempt to communicate well and to reason. If a blog of the style Ben is writing is to be successful and well-read then the author must not only write something interesting but must engage the reader and develop some empathy, some consideration for those who disagree with him and indeed those like LFAT and Iain Dale who dispute that he should be allowed to blog. A good blog receives feedback, and a good blogger responds to this in an effort to increase readership. All of these are aspects of rehabilitation that can easily be missed in traditional education, and especially in artificial environments, like a prison.

The blog can also allow aspects of rehabilitation that the essential isolation of a prison prevents and the environment of prison necessitates, interaction with the real world. Open prisons and day-release towards the end of a sentence have similar effect, but where used give far more liberty than blogging via mail!

My final point is that Ben’s is an excellent blog. I even toyed with the idea of making it a Featured Blog, but the first two I have chosen both relate to injustice, and Ben has made it clear that his life sentence is fair. Ben is intelligent, articulate and direct. Today he addressed an issue others have not and perhaps would not dare to address in the same way. It so happens that I agree with him, but that is not the point. A new viewpoint is welcome, as long as it is coherently argued.

Political Policing

The words ‘politics’ and ‘police’ have the same root, but they have drifted too far from the root and too close to each other. Polis meant a body of citizens or a city state, police protect them and politics represents them.

Now politics has moved away from that body of citizens, as have the police. I have previously made plain my disdain for the idea of hate crime. I don’t think motive should be important unless it mitigates the crime (for example self-defence). Setting apart certain groups as more important victims is not blind justice. Allowing the police and prosecutors to judge motive means they are automatically politicised.

In front of me is a case in point, in a copy of the Operational Directory for Sussex Police. Several parts of the ‘Hate Crimes’ section are politically controversial or likely to encourage misinterpretation.

On racism

“In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form”

What more subtle form? How does the officer know if he is seeing subtle racism or just inconsiderate and unthinking behaviour? Is an officer going to look to find subtle racism reading that advice? How about if he sees subtle racism when someone reports a crime by a non-white, so the police ignore the crime and go after the victim or witness? I would not have considered that 12 years ago, now it is easy to believe.

“The term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include both crimes and non-crimes in policing terms. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment”

Why should a non-crime “in police terms” be investigated by police at all? Why should they be investigated when there are not enough resources to investigate all crimes? If they are investigated at all why should they receive equal commitment?

“Incidents where visiting international students are the victims of crime will normally be recorded as racist incidents”

Why? This only goes to show that the way police define hate crime has no rational basis.

So the official guidance from Sussex Police advises that police see the bogeyman of racism and hate wherever possible, and to investigate even if there was no crime. This is advice to harass people for their thoughts and opinions. This is, quite literally, Orwellian. Reporting, recording and investigation of opinion as if we have no freedom of conscience is making political issues an offence.

Update: I spoke to a friend with police connections. One of the main reasons for identifying crimes against foreign students as racist is so that the files are easy to find from a large number of police reports. Remember that next time you see hate-crime statistics. Many of those are for convenience of categorisation, they are not hate crimes at all.

Funny how I don’t see this as reducing the relevance of my post.

Great News of Foreign Justice

It seems that the justice system in Brazil shows wisdom and compassion beyond many European courts, and certainly some in Britain.

Two English girls, Shanti Andrews and Rebecca Turner, who were bumming round the world before trying to find work, were caught out in an insurance scam. It is a fairly common one apparently, and often successful. They have just been served a sentence amounting to about 8 months of community service (up to 16 months if they only do one hour a day).

Not only does that sound a more realistic sentence than the one or two hundred hours they might have served here but they might do some good, both for the people of Brazil and for themselves. Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph speculates (an opinion piece) that they will probably clean in the favelas, teach English and read to orphans. This sounds entirely just, and beneficial.

However I can see how they ended up as criminals. The family of one criticised the Brazilian justice system for treating them harshly even before sentencing, one parent calling the fraud a “misunderstanding”. It is just an extension of the parents who support their obnoxious children against teachers in school, thinking their little darlings should be excused every misdemeanour. Personally I think the sentence is light, even on top of the short time they spent on remand.

They are now appealing to commute the sentence to a fine, so they can get home early. I thought they wanted to experience the world?

Presumably they tried fraud after running low on funds, so they could not pay the fine themselves. More parental coddling, how is that going to teach them anything? I hope the court keeps the sentence, hoping that real work in such poor communities will give them some perspective and insight and help make them better lawyers. Yes, these were law graduates, likely to end up practicing law or as politicians.

Arrogant Bureaucrats

In a recent post I mentioned that one way of silencing opposition was the ‘won’t you think of the children’ ploy. A classic example in the letters page of yesterday’s Telegraph, from Sir Christopher Rose, Chief Surveillance Commissioner.

It is unfortunate that you repeated the criticism of local authorities for using their Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act covert surveillance powers against dog fouling. This is, at best, a half truth.

It is unlikely that the use of those powers would be necessary or proportionate in relation to fouling a pavement. But fouling a children’s playground is much more serious, as dog excrement contains a parasite which can cause blindness in children.

I suspect that many people would welcome the use of these powers to reduce that risk.

The risks he mentioned are minor, otherwise how could we possibly allow a family with young children to even keep a dog? Covert surveillance makes a tiny difference to that already small risk. This is critical in deciding whether a response is proportional, yet Sir Christopher does not even mention statistics, instead ‘Just think of the children!’

What is more this has never been discussed openly as a reason for use of these powers. It should not be for a bureaucrat who clearly has no idea of proportionality or of people’s concerns about covert surveillance to decide such things.

Advice For Harman – How to Increase Rape Convictions

Harriet Harman is trying (again) to increase convictions for rape. The problem is that the authoritarian left in general, and Harriet Harperson specifically, hate men. She showed it recently, with her stupid and sexist statements, and even some irony (a female-led team was at the core of credit default swaps). Therefore their solutions are often attacks on men, rather than practical means of addressing the issue.

Women can claim rape without themselves ever being identified. Rape is a unique crime, in that typically there are no witnesses and it can be so similar to perfectly legitimate behaviour that it is almost impossible to distinguish scientifically. This allows another crime, potentially with equally devastating consequences, a crime even more rarely punished and whose victims Harriet Harman will never champion.

Women falsely accuse men of rape.

That is a statement that would cause howls of outrage among some in the left, especially the authoritarian, feminist left. Not outrage that I am lying (it is objectively true, and I think that few even of them would deny it). It is a truth that dare not be spoken except in regard to a tiny number of specific cases.

There are many reasons given why women will cry rape. The group known as “women” is not a homogenous mass, consisting of people like your friends, wives, sisters, girlfriends, mother, you if you are female. There are some angry, some weird, some odd, some delusional and some mad people out there, and probably half of them are women (hey, maybe I’ll argue one day that most of them are!). Not all of them are politicians. So when I say women cry rape, and they do so for various reasons, with varying levels of intent, I do not cast aspersions on women you know any more than “men rape” casts aspersions on me or men you know.

However there are women who would cry rape, and there is no reason for them not to. There is a miniscule chance of them ever being convicted of this dreadful crime, and they will not be identified.

Women who accuse men of rape are very rarely themselves even threatened with prosecution if it turns out their story is false. Of course if the case is weak that is right. Uniquely difficult as rape is to convict, it is also uniquely difficult to disprove for the very same reasons. When it appears that a woman has lied the police seem very reluctant to investigate, and try to prove the issue. Yet being accused of rape is a horrible position to be in. It is sure to be frightening and massively disruptive of life in the short term, but can also tear apart a life for a man, even a family, for years. In other words it can be as bad as being raped.

Where is this going? Well despite the silence the left would like, everyone knows that woman do falsely accuse men of rape. That means that in court the accuser, often the only eyewitness for the prosecution, has to work very hard to establish credibility, and that credibility is easy to destroy for a defence barrister.

So my solution, Ms Harperson, is two changes that you would revile. Give the accused in a rape case anonymity unless there is a strong, credible suspicion that releasing his name will bring forward more evidence. When a story of rape lacks any credibility the police should investigate the accuser, and if a case is made she (or he) should be prosecuted. Conviction should lead to a heavy sentence.

More Unintended Consequences

Or at least I assume so. Maybe I am naïve, and should be even more cynical. I give Labour very little credit, but even I don’t think that when they said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was intended to be used to counter terrorism they saw it being used to spy on those who had been hurt fighting terrorism. It is fairly obvious that the law was going to be used for surveillance with no connection to terrorism, otherwise the rules would have been more tightly written.

Politically, however, this is far worse than councils watching bins. The government’s relationship with the military has been bad since May 1997 but is terrible now, and continuing the meme of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, as the MoD does in this case, is not going down well in public.

As I have said before and I am sure I will say again, parliament needs to scrutinise legislation better. Ideally after more time has been taken to draft it. This government is all about panic reaction and guillotined debates.

The Unintended Consequences of the Law

or The Law of Unintended Consequences.

The legislatures of both the United Kingdom and the United States are currently being pressured into making new laws, or amending existing laws, with little debate, and even less understanding of the results of that legislation. The British Parliament is sitting for shorter times than ever, more debates are held with time limits than under any previous government. In the USA the new President’s administration is pushing new legislation with gay abandon, either in a fit of panic or, at the risk of sounding paranoid, in an attempt to push through the hard-left agenda he denied during campaigning.

We might laugh at the United States House of Representatives reaching the farcical level that those voting on the bill are not expected to read it (in fact the House Majority leader laughed at the idea that many would read it, and said that if only members who had pledged to read it first voted they “…would have very few votes”). Unfortunately in the UK our own House of Commons did not simply vote on passing control of 17% of the economy without having read the legislation. We ceded our entire constitution, ultimate control of every government decision and therefore of our lives through a treaty that was deliberately written to be unreadable.

There will be unintended consequences to this. New Labour has introduced unprecedented change. This includes creating criminal offences at an astonishing, rate, in a way that is utterly unfathomable. At times the rate of creation of new offences has been greater than one a day, the total topped 3000 long ago. Obviously this must criminalise some behaviour unnecessarily, because there was no huge clamour for these laws, there were not 3000 burning problems that needed solving. Worse than that, with so much legislation introduced with so little scrutiny some of the results of that legislation will be not as those voting for it intended.

For example under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 the police have greater power to stop and search in an area designated as a likely target. However the whole of London has been so designated since the law came into force. This is still the case despite criticism of the use of this power, including a report by the Metropolitan Police Authority two years ago.

When police are stopping people under the same Section of the Act for photographing famous buildings in London it looks like farce. However combined with the 2008 Act which appears to make it an offence to photograph a police officer, if the officer so decides, than sinister is perhaps a more apt adjective. If this sort of advice has to be given to the public and to police then the law is ill-written, and should be repealed until it can be remade. The link also describes incidents where the police abuse the Act.

There are far more cases. Anti-corruption legislation with unintended consequences for parish councils; pensions legislation that drove up costs; liquidity rules that drove down the value of pension and insurance holdings; the human rights act giving convicted criminals rights (especially to privacy) that they just should not have.

Of course even legislation that has been discussed at great length has unintended consequences. Anti-hunting bills have famously took up far more parliamentary time than they warrant, yet still the foxes suffer more since the ban than they did before, surely not the intent of the legislation.

There is one thing in common, and that is certainty. Governments that are certain they have right on their side, and that their legislation is well-drafted see no reason to debate at length. Anti-hunting campaigners were certain that they were right, so did not listen when told by the people who actually knew what they were talking about (few anti-hunt campaigners can shoot) that foxes would suffer. Suffer they did, for the arrogance of their advocates. Certainty means either that no debate is allowed (look at climate change) or that those who are certain do not listen to the other side of the debate (look at climate change).

That is why I have My Doubts.

Hat tips to Instapundit and Newsalert for the US House of Representatives story.

The Terrible Price of the EU

The EU is claimed by its supporters to be worth every price we pay in money, even as that goes up and our own economy slides. However there are other costs far greater, to our very soul of freedom and justice, developed in the UK over more than 800 years.

I am truly staggered to read in the Telegraph today the story of two Englishmen, Luke Atkinson and Michael Binnington, sentenced to three years in prison in Cyprus for manslaughter. They were sitting, very drunk, in the back of a car driven by their uncle which ran over and killed a teenage Cypriot boy. It was a terrible thing to happen for the boy and his family, but that does not excuse injustice.

The two Englishmen were originally cleared of any crime, while their uncle was sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter and grievous bodily harm. However the Cyprus Supreme Court then, in their absence, convicted them of manslaughter and GBH for encouraging their uncle to pursue the boy, with whom they had argued at a night club.

So now we have Englishmen extradited when for at least three obvious reasons they should not have been. The men were cleared by one court, and then convicted by a higher court, which would not be allowed under UK law. Secondly they were convicted in their absence, by what was in effect an appeal hearing, not a full trial. Third their actions, even if they do amount to manslaughter in Cyprus which I doubt, do not appear to under English law. The driver of the car was culpable, however they encouraged him. He is responsible for his own behaviour, and has a suitably long sentence to serve.

So the only reason these men have no recourse to justice is the European Arrest Warrant. This is exactly the sort of insane result that opponents of the European Arrest Warrant warned of before its introduction. It has significantly reduced the protection for British citizens against unjust treatment by foreign courts that do not hold the standards of British justice.

By the way I think that if these men did encourage their uncle to threaten this boy with his car, leading to his death, their behaviour was despicable. There are however many despicable, nasty people out there. Arbitrary justice is not going to resolve that. The rule of law is the first requirement for a civil society and for freedom. When I see people who are unpleasant but have commited no crime unjustly punished I always wonder what is to stop blameless people being treated the same.

Aside: I was not going to post anything about this; it is a complicated issue and I do not want to look as if I am second guessing the judge, who knows more than I. However I read this post at Muffled Vociferation, and realised that I had felt the same on reading the story, and had finally calmed down enough to post a reasoned response.