Privacy not Prism – UK legal challenge
privacynotprism.org.uk
privacynotprism.org.uk
I think it's worth making this as public as possible.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/948143.stm
One particularly interesting point:
"The UK was one of the first members of the Council of Europe to ratify the Convention when it passed through Parliament in 1951."
Indeed, Chruchill seems to have been very keen on the idea - how ironic!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009...
A big chunk of the UK consists of nutters. Look at the EDL for example. I've lived places where idiots like that are worshipped.
Thoroughly depressing.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/why-ukip-ha...
Daly with UK voter turn out being so low (between 60% and 70%) it's not so hard to grab some votes, especially if you spew the kind of stuff that UKIP spew.
It'd be interesting to see some vigorous modelling with different amounts of UKIP influence to see what happens (in the fictitious model).
I can't see any additional rights that I have that I didn't have before it became part of British law. All I see are dis-benefits.
Which human rights do you specifically want to lose?
Why is this a good thing? Prisoners are still citizens. Disenfranchising them only serves to further alienate them from society.
Time and again the ECHR has served as an important check on breaches of the European Convention by the UK. But a few examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_and_Grady_v_United_Kingdo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saunders_v_United_Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Bournewood_Community_and_Me...
Fucking infuriates me. It's safer to transfer your money in cash in a transparent bag with "steal me" on it.
I'm off of paypal for accepting payments but would love a solid alternative to sending money to people internationally (Chase Quickpay is great but you can't do international xfers).
This is an important step in our justice system, and it's something that we are (mostly) proud of. There are a few problems.
First, a lot of angst and effort goes into circumscribing the powers of the federal judiciary precisely because they're unelected. They are for instance limited to hearing actual controversies involving parties with standing.
Second, our constitutional system "works" because it follows from an actual constitution, which was ratified and over 200 years reshaped by elected representatives of the people. In no place in the US system is there an escape hatch for the Supreme Court to do whatever it thinks is right while contravening the constitution. A strong enough democratic majority can in fact force the Supreme Court to do anything, by amending the constitution.
If your definition of 'democracy' is a system of tyranny of the majority, where an elected government can do whatever it likes, create law in its own image without constitutional limit or fetter (for fear of 'subverting democracy'), then I don't particularly want to live in a democracy. And, thankfully, I don't.
Liberal democracy (in the classical sense) has the principle of Rule of Law rather than Rule of Man, with associated elements of due process, human rights, etc. ranking as more important than political will. This necessarily entails a disinterested, unelected, apolitical judiciary to decide when the legislature or executive has breached your constitution / human rights document / etc. This seems to work out a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
(Even if you reject that - and the UK in theory does have a system of Parliamentary sovereignty rather than legal sovereignty - it's still hardly 'subverting democracy'. The situation here is still the executive (GCHQ) may be acting in violation of the will of Parliament (as expressed in the HRA1998). Parliament delegates the task of deciding when the executive has violated its law to various judicial bodies, domestic and international).
However, courts ultimately derive their principles of justice from the values and traditions of a people. That's why international tribunals can have no legitimacy. It makes utterly no sense for judges in other countries, representative of people in other countries with different values and traditions, to weigh in on the actions of elected officials in your country. That's why Americans broadly dislike the idea, and I'd guess the majority of Britons do too.
It's impossible to look at the US judicial system and come away with the conclusion that it heedless of the concerns of Floridians hearing Alaskan cases. The US system is almost literally the opposite of that.
And the ECHR are extremely limited in which cases they can hear. Thus, we agree that just as scotus doesn't mean that you have a bunch of gun-slingin' Texans passing laws to control the lives of portland Oregon hipsters, we don't have frog-eating French controlling the lives of the Roast Beefs.
We have a Supreme Court, and we need one because we're one country under one Constitution and one Federal Government, but it's been bitterly divisive and I don't know why any country would want to subject themselves to that without those constraints.
That's a valid POV, but it can hardly be stated as fact. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes its existence to a broad consensus that, actually, certain fundamental principles of human rights are universal, and a South African has as much of a right to not be tortured by his government as an Englishman does. Of course, not everyone agrees, but denying any kind of universal quality to human rights is a fairly... niche form of cultural relativism.
> That's why international tribunals can have no legitimacy.
Aaand that's just a non-sequitur. The ECtHR has legal legitimacy to rule on UK issues because the UK voluntarily signed the ECHR. Its rulings do not have direct effect in the UK, but have a certain amount of indirect effect nevertheless because Parliament passed a law in 1998 giving them that. (FWIW, since then, the ECHR - which was mostly drafted by an Englishman - can also be enforced domestically in UK courts, and the ECtHR have only rarely overruled UK courts on ECHR interpretation issues).
So the situation here is the executive (GCHQ) possibly acting in violation of the will of Parliament (as expressed in the HRA1998). Parliament has delegated the task of deciding when the executive has violated its law to various judicial bodies, domestic and international. That's not subverting democracy. It's enforcing it.
And unfortunately interpreted by activist judges from the continent.
...And this is getting perilously close to philosophical wankery over competing definitions of the word 'democracy', which doesn't make for a very interesting discussion, so I should probably stop there :)
It would probably be cool if we figured out all basic human rights once and for all and had the written laws enforce themselves without human supervision. But the reality is that people are doing harm to people, not papers. And people decide when this harm is justified and when it's not.
This is nonsense. The ECHR is enforceable against states only (it's a treaty, after all - its signatories are states, not individuals). Non-state entities can't be sued, let alone prosecuted, for violating it - they're not bound by it.
It contains a list of rights and restrictions that states must comply in their three capacities (when taking executive actions, making laws, and ruling on cases). The rights are things like 'right not to be tortured' and 'right to free expression', not 'right to buy milk for 50p'.
(Ironically, if a state did decide to price-fix some basic substance, they're then in danger of running afoul of a different set of international laws: EU free trade regulations).
Human Rights law in the EU serves much the same role as constitutional law does in the US: an underlying set of values that the behaviour of the government must be consistent with. Article 8 ECHR serves much the same role as the US 4th Amendment in limiting searches.
Besides, if there's genuine consensus the rules can be changed and the judiciary have to go along with that.
Are you claiming that an international tribunal to try a case against an unlawful executive is worse? Or are you claiming that if the executive does it, it isn't unlawful?
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
It's Direct Debit (not credit card / paypal) which means less fees.
They'll do this the right way.