Demolish Daft Laws

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A lot of fuss was made when France banned the wearing of the burqa in public places. So how many people have been fined for breaking this law? None it seems. Women have continued to wear the burqa and apparently they get more hostility from the public since the law was passed, but they do not get fined.

There have been a number of demonstrations by burqa wearing women hoping to be penalised so that they could go to the European Court of Human Rights or to challenge whether the law was in conflict with the French constitution. The usual kinds of antics that will consume large amounts of public money, but make no difference at all to how people lead their lives.

A man wearing a burqa in the colours of the French flag has been charged. Not with burqa wearing, but with the more serious charge of outraging the flag. It can only be concluded from this that the burqa ban cannot apply to men. That must be a relief for John Simpson who famously liberated Afghanistan while wearing one. It may also be an encouragement to admirers of the failed 21/7 bomber who fled the country in a burqa. Despite being a tall man it seems that nobody thought to peep inside before allowing him to escape our shores in the middle of a major terror alert.

Before the French burqa ban, the Swiss voted to ban minarets. The immediate reaction was for a shopkeeper to knock up a plywood minaret, shin up a ladder and stick it on top of his chimney. What is a minaret? Unfortunately none of the foolish people who wanted to prevent mosques from being built, but didn’t have the balls to say so, had thought that one through. I have got news for them. Even if their stupid law worked, mosques don’t have to have minarets.

Why am I rambling on about this rubbish? In the aftermath of the mass murder in Norway and revelations that the killer had British connections we are likely to be faced with calls for new laws to make sure that it doesn’t happen here. Among the demands to make it illegal to be mad, or whatever other ridiculous proposition they think up perhaps we should pause to consider what we are doing.

The burqa and minaret bans, however they may be dressed up, are expressions of unease at the growing presence of Islam in countries where it is seen as an alien presence. Some will be afraid of jihadi fundamentalism, others will be unhappy about the loss of their cultural identity and some will probably have religious concerns about the threat to primacy of their beliefs.

All of these are reasonable worries. The problem with the laws is that to the deranged mind of a person like Anders Breivik, legal resistance to an Islamic takeover has failed and he needs to start a war to do what the burqa and minaret bans failed to do. Let’s be clear, I am not suggesting that silly laws are the cause of the Norwegian tragedy, spree killers have all kinds of reasons for doing terrible things.

The point I am making is that laws cannot solve social problems. Proscribing organisations results only in them changing their names or going underground. It does not get rid of the reasons why those organisations managed to find followers in the first place. The same applies to bans on the symbols of Islam or any other thing that is bothering people.

Resolving social tensions cannot be done by governments. We have to work out decent and secure arrangements for society among ourselves. If a woman has her face covered in the street it is not a problem for me and it is none of my business whether she made that decision for herself or if she might have been pressured by her family of community to do it. Those things are for her to decide and it is only right for others to be involved if she asks them.

If the same woman wants to teach, be a student in a class, enter a bank, pass through border control, collect a child from school, or engage in any other activity where her identity or eye contact are necessary for that process to be properly and safely undertaken, then she must show her face. That should be dealt with by the woman concerned and whoever she is interacting with. No law could ever cover all situations and the state should not intervene in disputes about whether or not it is necessary for the face to be revealed for a specific purpose.

Similarly with minarets or any other building styles. It is offensive for the state to try to impose centralised building control that stifles cultural, religious or taste preferences at a local level. Land owners should be able to erect safe structures on their property without constraint other than to the extent that it might damage the enjoyment of the property of neighbours. If a place of worship, entertainment or whatever is going to disturb the neighbourhood in which it is proposed, then it is for the residents of that neighbourhood to resolve the matter. If they cannot reach agreement, a town or community council should be able to require conditions on the building, but there is no place for a remote government to dictate how things should be.

Alienation is at the root of social conflict and genuine localism is the only solution.

The Inadequacy of Adversarial Justice

Recently I wrote a piece on the failings of the jury system as a way of delivering justice. However, juries are just the secret voting system which decides the winner of a battle between two champions and we also need to consider whether the adversarial court system is the best way of doing things.

 

It is worth noting that the reason we do things this way is a hangover from the medieval practice of trial by combat. This allowed disputants who were not in a position to physically fight their own cause (women for example) to appoint a champion to represent them. The barrister in a wig with a silver tongue is the equivalent of a knight on a horse with a lance.

 

In this piece I am only exploring possible improvements in the criminal justice system. In the UK we also have an adversarial system for civil matters where it is often even less appropriate than in the criminal courts.

 

Neutral third party mediation offers many advantages over the adversarial system in civil matters. It should be less formal and time consuming and my preference would be for it to be run by a private organisation rather that the government. The process involves a mediation that evaluates the circumstances and attempts to come to a fair outcome that benefits all parties that are involved. The outcome is not necessarily a one-sided judgement, so there is not a winner or a loser. Mediation is an excellent process for working through civil matters such as divorce, child custody disputes, neighbour dispute, debt and financial disputes, etc.

 

Mediation is more desirable than traditional litigation to resolve matters such as custody. The “win-lose” approach of the adversarial system often does not promote the best interests of the child. Private mediators require qualifications in psychology and social work for family or neighbour matters or financial qualifications for debt cases. They have an advantage over most judges because of their training in the specific field. Child custody involves a lifetime of cooperation. As people change over time they can return to the mediator to work through changes that benefit all parties. This can be done in a much quicker manner than in an adversarial court system.

 

Another advantage to private mediation is the substantial saving to the individuals involved because they do not necessarily need a lawyer to represent them. The taxpayer also benefits because participants must cover the costs of their own cases.

 

Returning to criminal law, shouldn’t it be self-evident that instead of a battle taking place between prosecution and defence over who can win twelve people to their side, the objective of a court should be to uncover the truth and protect society by ensuring that criminals are dealt with and innocent people do not suffer injustice. Apart from the problem of the outcome being dependent on the the most persuasive lawyer rather than the truth of what happened, the adversarial system also has ‘rules of combat’ which can only get in the way of exposing everything that needs to be known. We could probably agree that an accused person should be presumed to be innocent until they have been found to be guilty of a crime, but why should that include a right to silence? If a person has been wrongfully accused of a crime they ought to be eager to give every assistance in establishing their innocence. Silence from the accused only has the purpose of allowing the battle between the barristers can go on without the defence lawyer having his lance blunted. It has nothing to give to the discovery of truth.

 

Some might object that a defendant should not be forced to say that he was committing one crime in order to show that he could not have done the one of which he is accused. Why not? More justifiably it might be said that there may be alibi evidence that an accused person is entitled to keep private. Quite so and that is no problem. Although there should be no right to silence, there is also no requirement that all evidence is revealed in open court. If an investigating judge is provided with solid evidence that an accused could not possibly have committed a crime due to a strong alibi, that is all that the world needs to know. The key point is that all citizens have a responsibility to assist the pursuit of justice and an accused person is not excused from that duty.

 

As with the right of silence, the double jeopardy rule must be discarded. In recent years in the UK a second trial of an acquitted person has been allowed in a few circumstance of new evidence as it is increasingly recognised that dangerous criminals should not enjoy lifelong impunity because of a failed trial. The rule needs to go completely, along with the whole mindset that a trial can be tripped up on procedural challenges and a criminal acquitted unjustly.

 

So how would an alternative to the battleground court work? The alternative to adversarial trials is usually described as an inquisitorial method. Systems in use vary in their detail, but the basic principle is that crimes brought before the courts are first handled by an investigating judge or magistrate. It is the responsibility of this person to uncover as much evidence as possible about the crime and the possible responsibility for it. When sufficient evidence has been gathered to indicate that a person or persons have a case to answer, charges are laid and the case goes to hearing before a trial judge. The investigating judge will continue to gather evidence, if necessary, right up to trial. All parties are required to provide honest cooperation with the investigator at all stages and there is no right to withhold information. Giving false information or concealing evidence is a crime irrespective of whether it is done by a defendant, the police or lawyers.

 

When the case comes to trial, instead of examination and cross examination in a theatrical performance before a jury, prosecution and defence lawyers present their case to the judge in a verbal statement to add to the written submission already passed on by the investigating judge. The trial judge can ask questions of anybody involved in the case and if he or she wants to explore the quality of expert evidence or require additional expertise, they are able to do so.

 

One of the most important aspects is that even if a defendant has confessed or pleaded guilty, the trial must continue until the judge is satisfied that guilt is established or the accused is acquitted. This is an essential protection for people who are vulnerable to police pressure or who have mental difficulties that pre-dispose them to take responsibility for things they haven’t done.

 

I have referred throughout to the trial judge in the singular, but this is an oversimplification. One judge is satisfactory for cases where the possible custodial sentence is no greater than one year. Where there is a possibility of custody of between one and ten years there should be three presiding judges and for the most serious crimes a panel of five senior judges is appropriate.

 

Unlike jury trials in which no reason is ever given for the verdict and there is no way of knowing what reasoning the jurors undertook in reaching their conclusion, the judgements in an inquisitorial system must always be supported by written reasons. If the reasoning is faulty that is a basis for appeal.

 

Related articles

• Abolish the Jury System (malpoet.wordpress.com)

The Big Society

Society has been progressively smothered by big government in a process that started at least a hundred years ago with the Lloyd George government.
It will take several generations for citizens to emerge from their present infantilised condition to be able to run their own lives, bring up their families and self manage their communities.
Government cannot create a ‘Big Society’, it can only start getting out of the way so that society is given the space to grow.
At the moment our economy is prevented from emerging from worldwide recession by the enormous debt created by the disgraceful spending spree in which the Labour Government tried to buy an election victory.
Job creation is also strangled by the the thousands of laws and regulations that began with the deluge of equality and health and safety laws in 1974 and reached epidemic proportions with the last government. I know that many people like to blame the EU for this. They play their part, but the truth is that our own government gold plates EU directives all the time and our bureaucrats are at least as bad as the Brussels ones.
Never mind the political slogan of Big Society. Let us have the freedom to build our societies. Essential steps are to cut state spending and cut taxes. Abolish laws and regulations that are making it difficult to employ people and unattractive for enterprises to want to operate in Britain.
Reduce the number of MPs, abolish all Quangos and scrap unaccountable bodies like the House of Lords. Devolution of some power to Scotland, Wales & NI was a good thing, but nothing like enough. Power must be devolved from Westminster to villages, towns and communities. Society can only function on a human scale. Things affecting our everyday lives should be the responsibility of ourselves and people who are so close to us that we know them and can call them to account.
National and international bodies are necessary for the law of the sea, defence of the nation and the small number of things which cannot be done locally.
Power corrupts. We have too many corrupt politicians because they have been allowed to take on too much control of our lives. Laws are necessary, but they need to be small in number, easily understood and rigorously enforced. We should never have got into a situation where some of our law makers are law breakers. The answer is to bring politics home, or at least to our neighbourhoods.

All Hail President Rompoy and Foreign Minister Ashton

Rompoy and Ashton have no legitimacy. When they spend our money and speak on our behalf throughout the world there will be no way for us to hold them to account for what they do.

Queen Elizabeth is an unelected, unaccountable head of state, not just of the United Kingdom, but of dependencies and former colonies scattered across the globe; the remnants of a long gone empire.

The monarchy has a place in history, but no legitimacy in a modern democracy. All that could be said for the monarchy is that its powers have been effectively removed.

This is not the case for the unelected and unaccountable members of the House of Lords, including the bishops of the established church, who happily lie about where they live to collect massive ‘expenses’
 while passing laws to interfere ever more in our lives. This affront to democracy is an even greater anachronism than the monarchy.

Monarchy, aristocracy, state religion and a secretive, establishment judiciary all have the excuse of history and tradition to justify themselves. That is a weak excuse which freedom lovers should reject.

When it comes to the United Nations, which is a clique of the victorious powers of 1945, having no democratic legitimacy; the EU, which has been cobbled together in an authoritarian way, to prevent the re-emergence of German nationalism and then to consolidate the victory in the cold war we have anti democratic affronts growing up in our own times and we should be far more ashamed of that.

To cap it all, our daily lives are run by 800 quangos spending £35 billion pounds every year. Appointed by cronies, accountable to nobody, these people are the embodiment of the snooper, nanny state that steals our money and controls our lives.

Rompoy is a parasitic nonentity put in place by a cabal of Euro oligarchs. Give him the respect he deserves. At the same time help us get rid of the unrepresentative parasites on our doorstep who really control our lives.

Drugs and the Law

The Home Secretary has sacked Professor David Nutt from his position as Chairman of the supposedly independent Drug Advisory Committee. The alleged reason was that Nutt was lobbying for a change in government policy when the reality is that the government insisted on re-classifying cannabis against the evidence presented by the experts and refuses to accept the expert advice on the proper handling of ecstasy.

The simple truth is that the government has no interest at all in professional advice. What it really wants is to be able to use the experts to justify the decisions that it is determined to take irrespective of where the truth may lie.

When cannabis was reduced from a class B to a class C drug in accordance with expert advice and with the support of police who wanted to concentrate on real crime there was not an increase in cannabis use as anti drug campaigners predicted. There was actually a reduction in cannabis use when it was regarded as a less serious offence. This should not be too much of a surprise. Forbidden things always have an attraction and if it is recognised as not being such a big deal, the excitement and pull reduces.

It is not sensible risk mental and physical wellbeing by harmful drug use. That applies to alcohol and tobacco as much as it does to the misuse of medicines or taking illegal, recreational drugs. The point is that humans have always done these things and no amount of laws will stop them. Masking it illegal to take certain drugs causes death, injury and serious ill health because the drug users do dangerous things like sharing needles and taking contaminated products supplied by the criminals who are the only source of the drug they want.

Illegailty also creates a vast amount of crime. This ranges from the international multi millionaires who produce the drugs to the street corner gangs who murder and maim to protect their territory. Very few societies have had the courage to leave drug users alone, but those who have tried, such as Holland and Portugal, have found enormous benefit from it.

It is impossible to stop people from trying to use escapist substances. The best way to minimise the harm and risk is to provide the free and prosperous society from which people do not need to try to escape. Our police should also be left to stop rape, violence, burglary and terrorism.

We should throw out a government that sacks people for telling the truth.

Afghanistan, marital rape, women’s rights, secrecy and fake democracy

It has now been reported that implementation of a law concerning family matters for the Shia community of Afghanistan has been suspended after an outcry by western countries about its provisions.

This confused affair exposes the almost complete ignorance in the west of the nature of the society that they are involved in in Afghanistan as well as showing the corrupt and duplicitous nature of the Afghan government.

Afghanistan is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its own constitution guarantees equality of women, but the new Shia law is a viciously reactionary document permitting men to force sex on their wives, confine women to their homes, denying women proper inheritance and allowing child marriage. Karzai has tried to claim that western critics have a wrong understanding of the law because of inadequacies in translation. This is not believable, but if it were true it would be easy for him to dispel concerns by publishing the document immediately rather than keeping it secret. The law was passed by the Afghan government and signed by Karzai in conditions of secrecy which are an outrageous affront to democratic methods.

The Afghan constitution is supposed to guarantee freedom of religion and equality of treatment of all citizens. This Shia law is in clear breach of that commitment and it is reported that work is continuing on a family law for the majority Sunni community. The likelihood is that such a law would also contain seriously discriminatory and retrogressive provisions.

The truth is that Karzai is trying to gain favour with religious extremists and oppressive clan leaders in advance of elections. In this process he is prepared to ignore and contradict all the undertakings he gave to the international community in order to get aid and military support to overcome insurgency. There is no genuine democracy in Afghanistan; its government is corrupt and icompetent.

When the Taleban ruled Afghanistan they were guilty of disgusting crimes. Apart from oppressing women in the most revolting manner they murdered gay people and savagely maimed others in the name of their perverted justice. By giving hospitality and support to Al Quaida they placed the whole world at a much greater risk of terrorist murder than it would otherwise have been. It is right for the international community to have a presence in Afghanistan to ensure that there is no return to such an intolerable tyranny. What must be made clear to President Karzai and his government is that the undertakings given to take their country forward with the establishment of universal human rights and dignity are an absolute requirement and there can not be any backsliding.

Only those who commit themselves genuinely to democracy and progress are entitled to any support. The Shia family law must be scrapped immediately and the constitutional rights of women and children fully enforced for all communities.

 

 

Rowan Williams and sharia – Stupid, Wrong and Dangerous

 

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has today gone from just being a rather silly man to being a dangerous one.

 

In an interview with the BBC he says that it now seems inevitable that Britain should allow parts of Islamic Sharia law to be incorporated into British law if social cohesion is to be maintained.

 

He says that he is thinking in terms of certain aspects of financial and marriage law being given the support of legal enforcement rather than the hideous punishments of sharia being introduced to the UK.

 

Williams points out that orthodox Jews have their own courts that have some forms of recognition and he goes on to waffle about Catholic attitudes to abortion needing, and getting, some form of recognition by doctors being able to exempt themselves from involvement in abortion.

 

What he is doing is deliberately confusing the right of some professionals to decline to take part in certain practices on the basis of conscience with the introduction of a different system of law for part of the population. That is dangerous, divisive and, to me at least, abhorrent.

 

Muslims can already conduct their financial affairs according to their preferences. Basically that means avoiding deposits and loans involving interest. Provided they have entered a contract, they will have the protection of civil law to enforce those contracts. They do not need, and should not have, any special or different treatment in law.

 

When it comes to marriage, divorce, custody and other relationship matters, it is utterly unacceptable that sharia should have any recognition at all. All sharia courts are male dominated and the culture in Islamic societies generally is discriminatory. If there were a choice of using British law or sharia courts in Britain, muslim women would come under irresistible pressure to use the sharia system. As a result they would lose custody of their children when they should not, they would suffer disadvantage in divorce and in financial settlements.

 

Above all, the objection to incorporation of sharia into British law is that we live in a democracy. That requires that our chosen government is the only law making body in the country and the same law must apply to everybody without exception.

 

One of the failings of our system is that it includes bishops like Williams to have a place in the House of Lords where they are able to speak and vote on legislation despite being accountable to nobody. In this recent statement Williams has shown himself unfit to be a part of the legislature.

 

All religious involvement in our legislature should be abolished. We now need an end to the established church and we must have the abolition of blasphemy laws, tax exemption for religious schools and all other preferential treatment for religion by the state. People are entitled to hold religious beliefs, but the church has no entitlement to influence law, undermine democracy or to be subsidised by taxpayers.

Repeal the British Blasphemy Laws

A Thinking Man whose interesting blog is linked under my blogroll has called for his Member of Parliament to vote in favour of an amendment which would abolish the blasphemy laws in Britain. I agree with him very strongly. I will write to my MP and I urge others to do the ame.

The reasons he gives are very well put and I see no reason to add anything. They are as as follows:

• The law of blasphemous libel purports to protect beliefs rather than people or communities. I accept there may be the need for laws to protect particular groups concerning things that they have no control over – race, gender, age, ability. But a religion is a choice. Those who make that choice should argue and defend it. Its defence should not be enshrined in the law of the land.
• If god is god, she or he does not need the protection of the law.
• It serves no useful purpose other than to allow partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.
• It is discriminatory in that it only covers attacks on Christianity and Church of England tenets. It therefore fosters an expectation among other religions that their sensibilities should also be protected by the criminal law (as with the attempt to charge Salman Rushdie) and a sense of grievance among minority religions that they do not benefit from their own version of such a law.
• The Church of England no longer opposes its abolition on principle.
• In 1985 the Law Commission recommended its repeal, because it is uncertain in scope, it doesn’t allow merit or lack of intention as a defence, and it is unlimited in penalty.
• It is in clear breach of human rights because it is discriminatory and unnecessarily limits free expression.
  
• In the end, no one is likely to be convicted under it. (Nobody has been since 1921.)