| VIEWERS -TOP TOPICS-WKLY/ARCHIVE *HOME-PT 2 | ||
What PLANET are JUDGES living ON?
* Daily MailWednesday, May31-2006. by Melanie Phillips
ARE OUR senior judges simply
living on a different planet from the rest of us lesser mortals? Our most senior judge, The Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Phillips, has launched yet another judicial broadside against
apparent evils of imprisonment. In
Lord Phillips’ UNIVERSE, it appears that PRISON is NOT the PLACE for CRIMINALS. Instead, wherever possible
judges should pass community sentences -which he admits will not be tolerated
by the public unless they include ‘significant punishment’ -because ‘the
sensible place for rehabilitation is the community.’ EXCUSE ME? COMMUNITY SENTENCES FAIL TO
REHABILITATE CRIMINALS. THEY RESULT IN AN EVEN HIGHER RATE OF RECIDIVISM THAN
JAIL SENTENCES. This is hardly surprising,
since community sentences seem to be hardship-free zones. According to a recent report
by the Chief
Inspector of Probation -burglars and robbers in London are being set to restore antique furniture or make costumes for the Notting Hill carnival. [You couldn’t make it up if
you tried] And thousands of criminals sentenced to unpaid community service do nothing at all some days. When they turn up, there are
no probation staff to supervise them, so they are simply sent home. And those
who don’t who don’t even bother to turn up are NOT taken back to COURT and
re-sentenced. It may amaze Lord Phillips
to learn that ‘significant punishment’ means going TO PRISON. YES, overcrowding means prisons don’t function properly. But the remedy for that is TO BUILD MORE PRISONS. YET our senior judges
harbour an obsessive animosity towards prison, doubtless because of the way
Human Rights doctrine has so muddled the way we look at the very concepts of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Lord Phillips’ remarks, however were more bizarre still. One reason prison numbers are rising, he said, was that drug users were deliberately committing crimes to get into prison drug programmes. He had come across prisoners offered community sentences who preferred to go to prison so that they could get treatment. Offenders What
on earth does the Lord Justice have under his wig? There is no proper evidence for this at all. Indeed, an investigation by
MPs said last year that fewer than half of all jails had drug treatment courses,
that ONLY one in ten prisoners who use drugs got places on drug
treatment programmes, and that half of those who did go on courses NEVER
FINISHED THEM. As for supposedly non-existent community drug treatment programmes, they do EXIST- but are pretty useless in turning offenders away from crime. In
a recent report, the Commons Public Accounts Committee observed that
drug treatment orders were ‘more like a GET
OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD’ than a
rehabilitation programme. Only
25 per cent of those who accepted them ever completed them. It is deeply worrying not only that a senior judge should make such odd and ill-informed remarks, BUT that the JUDICIARY should assume it knows better what policies should be pursued. Yesterday, the former Lord
Chief Justice, Lord Woolf [The
burglars’ friend] expanded upon such arrogance. Apparently making a coded
attack on the Prime Minister for his criticisms of a judge over the immigration
ruling, Lord Woolf condemned politicians for ‘knocking’ individual judges,
because it was ‘very damaging’. So lets get this right.
Judges may make comments, which are not only wildly inappropriate because they
are intensely political, but also reveal themselves to be woefully OUT OF TOUCH. Yet then they loftily inform
us that we should not criticise them for doing so, because they apparently
reside on some celestial plane above public debate. Of course, in principle
politicians and judges should have a Chinese wall between them. And it was once
clearly understood that politicians and judges stood on either side of the
wall. But the problem is that the
judges have torn up that understanding and are now getting involved in matters
of POLICY such as the role of imprisonment or drug treatment, which ARE
properly the territory of POLITICIANS. The judges have simply grown too big for their wigs. One of the main reasons is the Human Rights law. Lord Woolf robustly defended this yesterday and said that any resulting tension between GOVERNMENT and JUDICIARY was healthy in a democracy. WeaknessBut the fact is that Human
Rights law has given the judges a weapon to undermine democracy, by setting up
themselves rather than politicians as the people who should decide how the
country should be ruled. This first surfaced back in
the 1980s, when senior judges decided that the long years of Tory government
and the weakness of the opposition posed such a threat to democracy that the
judiciary should take upon itself the mantle of opposition instead. In the days before the
passage of the Human Rights Act [1998], this took the form of challenges to immigration
law through judicial review. Such attempts to change the direction of
government policy through court rulings became known as judicial activism. When Tony Bair came to power,
instead of putting the judges back behind the Chinese wall he attached a
turbo-charge to their already burgeoning judicial activism by introducing the
Human Rights Act. This change in the behaviour
of judges was by no means restricted to Britain. Judicial activism had become a
phenomenon throughout the WESTERN WORLD. In America, Australia, the
countries of the EU and elsewhere, the judges - Acting as a kind of judicial
fifth column around the world - are arrogating to themselves power, which
belong to the world of politics. Earlier this year, in a little
noticed address in London to the Law Commission, a prominent Australian judge,
Michael Kirby - a key proponent of judicial activism- spelt out the judge’s
agenda with unabashed frankness. The institutions of
government in both Britain and Australia, he said, had become unbalanced.
Governments had become too powerful, civil servants and MPs had lost influence
to political advisers and ministerial accountability was a thing of the past. Amen to that. BUT he went on to say that as a result ‘the very notion of “sovereignty” of
parliament has become a somewhat inapposite concept’
There should be instead a new type of government led by judges and based on HUMAN RIGHTS LAW - which was already developing in BRITAIN. So the remedy for politicians who were abusing their powers was to replace them by JUDICIAL POWER. This
was nothing less than an all-out attack on parliamentary democracy. [Whatever is left of it
after nine years of Tony Blair] Yet Justice Kirby was given
a platform by our principle legal reform body -the Law Commission - and
before an appreciative audience, which included Lord Phillips, Lord Woolf
and the Lord Chancellor. Despised English judges express
similar alarming distain for democracy. Last year Lord Bingham, the Senior
Law Lord, said that the Human Rights Convention existed to protect
vulnerable minorities. Which were sometimes disliked, resented or despised. It should therefore come as
no surprise, he went on, that decisions vindicating their rights ‘should
provoke howls of criticism by politicians and the mass media. They generally
reflect majority opinion.’ So majority opinion, on this
account, was essentially illegitimate, and the role of the JUDICIARY was to use
HUMAN RIGHTS LAW to do it down. This unashamed justification
of judicial supremacism is as anti m-democratic as it is arrogant. We are
living through a kind of creeping judicial coup d’etat driven by a profound contempt
for the PUBLIC OPINION-to which politicians are
answerable. It is parliamentary weakness that is to blame. Only if Parliament reasserts itself will the RULE OF LAW
-
be
rescued from RULE OF LAWYERS -who have so high-handedly
hijacked it? * * * [Font altered -bolding &
underlining used -comments in brackets] * [Well it must occur to many
in this country that the present sorry predicament of OUR PARLIAMENT - only benefits those in the
Judiciary and of course the growing army of lawyers many of whom have grown
rich on their human rights harvest which Tony Blair and his flatmate Lord
Falconer have no doubt been sowing with hindsight for years. What better way to
destroy an immemorial institution of over 700 in the making than to undermine
it from within while professing that their attempts to govern are undermined by
the JUDICIARY? WHO CAN WE POSSIBLY TRUST? THERE MUST SURELY BE A
SEQUAL TO FOLLOW? * * * MAY/06* * www.noliberties.com[Latest Addition - June07] * * *
*
Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION to the EU
*
VOTE MAY -2007
WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE TO SET YOU FREE
THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY
TO RECLAIM YOUR DEMOCRACY DON'T VOTE FOR THE TRIPARTITE PARTIES IN WESTMINSTER BUT SMALL PARTIES THAT SPEAK THEIR MINDS WITHOUT SPIN AND LIES. *
ONLY WILL BRING DEMOCRACY BACK TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE *
* MAY/07
[All underlined words have a separate bulletin] * *FOR RETURN TO *
|
||