Human Rights

[leo9]

There is another side to that Niemoller Principle though ... when you speak up to protect child molesters and axe murderers from the consequences of their crimes, it doesn't help.

And this is how they get you every time: by telling you it's all about child molesters and axe murderers, and who cares if they get a fair trial or decent treatment, given that they're guilty anyhow and should be [insert whatever revolting punishment happens to appeal to your imagination.] So you don't notice, until it hits you personally, that the unjust laws you were happy to see used on the bad people are just as unjust when they are used against you and me.

People attack proper legal treatment for axe murderers or child rapists by asking "what if your child was the victim?" Which is a fair question, so long as you also ask the question, "what if your child were falsely accused of the crime?" And suddenly a system in which people go free if their guilt can't be proved doesn't look so bad.

By the way, when you hear a police spokesman say that because of some reform of the system "X number of murderers have gone free," what he actually means is "X number of people we arrested and were sure were guilty went free." Do you see the small but significant difference?

Really, the root failing of both police states like Hitler's or Hussein's and botched legal approaches like the ECHR is the failure to distinguish between guilt and innocence.

I really have trouble believing that you said that with a straight face, but let's look at it as if it were a serious proposition.

Police states such as you describe have a very clear idea of the difference between guilt and innocence. Guilt is being accused by the police or other authorities: innocence is not being accused by them. It couldn't be simpler, since they don't need to worry about technicalities like evidence, and if witnesses are considered useful they can always be told what to say, or shot if they refuse. Confessions are the tidiest proof of guilt, and those can usually be arranged, as the Bush administration discovered anew.

The ECHR also makes a clear distinction. Guilt is having been found guilty by a fair trial: innocence is not having been. And they frequently cause problems for governments, including our own, who would much rather use the other definition I mentiones, which saves so much time and expense and allows them to present the voters with a nice neat story - crime, criminal found, criminal punished. (Or, in the case of things like the imaginary ricin plot, crime prevented and criminal punished, which looks even better and saves the trouble of waiting for people to actually do something bad before punishing them.)

What you are complaining about is not actually guilt and innocence. What you are complaining about is that even after someone has been found guilty, people like the ECHR continue to treat him like a human being, who should be punished for his crime but not otherwise treated worse than any other human being. And I can quite see that for those for whom the world is divided into good people, who deserve rights and protection, and bad people, who deserve nothing except the shit of the world, this is intollerable. If I believed the world were so simple, I'd feel the same.

In recent years, we have seen politicians releasing convicted mass-murderers for political and financial gain,

A blatantly unjust abuse of power, I couldn't agree more, but you weaken your protests against such scandals when you lump them in with a great many more defensible decisions. And it's worth also noting that the strongest reason they forced that through was that the chap was probably, on the evidence available, innocent, and had an appeal coming up where it might very well have been proved. Rushing him to Libya as a favour for oil, and publicly blaming it on those bleeding-heart human rights people, saved the government and the courts a huge heap of embarrassment, not to mention the possibility of a humungous compensation payment which would have angered equally those who believed him innocent and those who believed that the security services are never wrong.

foreign killers allowed to walk free because sending them back to their own home would "infringe their rights"

Look at it this way. Pick a regime you know to be vile and murderous - Mugabe's, Gadafi's, Khomeni's, whatever makes your personal flesh creep. And a victim of their persecutions comes here for safety with the marks of torture on him and the rest of his family already killed by the secret police. And since being an enemy of an evil tyrant doesn't automatically make him an honest man, he does something wrong - say, drives away from a fatal accident. (All the more likely if he's not just in fear of the law, but in fear of being sent home.) Of course, he should be tried and sentenced just like anyone else, and he is. But if you then deport him as well, you are sentencing him to death, probably a very nasty death. If parliament wanted hit-and-run drivers to die by torture, they would have legislated accordingly: since they didn't, it is reasonable to question whether it is just to add that to his sentence.

But that's different from the cases you are angry about, right? The difference is, the ones you reckon should be deported are not clearly good people. And you know they are bad people because the media tell you so.

It can be an amazing sight how the press can show us an evil, despicable villain that clearly needs to be sent home, or just dropped out of a plane a mile out to sea: and then the regime in his home country falls out with ours, and suddenly he's a poor helpless victim who we have a duty to shelter and protect. Or vice versa. You can avoid all that confusion if you simply focus on the fact that this is a person, like you or me, regardless of whether the media like him or loathe him.

- and yes, we see those same authorities persecuting over non-crimes which harm nobody.

I'd agree with you, except that I'm sure we have very different lists of non-crimes, and other people would have others instead. It's a complicated world.