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Imagine a future where you could find yourself arrested for crimes for which you were acquitted nearly twenty years ago… where you can be found guilty and sentenced in your absence and without your knowledge… a future where when you go on holiday abroad you find yourself being arrested for you know not what – and those arresting you do not know either; they just know you are wanted in another foreign country.
This is not the future.
I have added emphasis to this BBC story about Deborah Dark in order to highlight aspects that particularly shocked me but otherwise left it unchanged.
A British grandmother is being pursued by France for a crime she was convicted of in her absence 20 years ago.
Deborah Dark, 45, from London, was acquitted of a drugs offence in 1989 – but found guilty and sentenced to six years on appeal without being told.
France issued a European Arrest Warrant in 2005 but recent extradition attempts have failed in both the UK and Spain.
UK charity Fair Trials International said the warrant system was creating a “blatant injustice” against her.
Ms Dark, from Richmond in south-west London, was arrested in France in 1989 in a car containing several kilos of cannabis.
A French court believed her defence that she been set up by an abusive boyfriend and was acquitted.
But she was unaware the prosecution appealed without telling her after she returned to the UK and she was found guilty and sentenced in 1990.
A European Arrest Warrant was issued by the French authorities for Ms Dark to be returned to France to serve her jail term.
Ms Dark told the BBC of the effect that still being officially wanted in France had had on her.
She said: “It’s destroyed me, and to see my daughter to go through all that pain again. I just will never forget it.
“I can’t leave the country. If I leave the country I will be arrested because I’m still on the European Arrest Warrant.”
In 2007 she was arrested on a package holiday at a Turkish airport but the authorities were unable to give her a reason.
On her return to the UK the British police could not find any warrants against her.
When Ms Dark travelled to visit her retired father in Spain in 2008 she was arrested and spent one month in custody.
But a Spanish court refused to extradite her on the grounds of unreasonable delay and the significant passage of time.
When she returned to the UK she was arrested by British police at Gatwick airport and released on bail pending an extradition hearing. Magistrates refused extradition in April this year.
Fair Trials International said Ms Dark was effectively being “imprisoned in the UK”.
Chief executive Jago Russell said: “Deborah’s case is a shocking example of the way a system intended to deliver justice has created a blatant injustice.
“The European Arrest Warrant should have been designed with a time-limit built in but it wasn’t.
“The result – a person’s life can be turned upside down for an event alleged to have happened 20 years ago.”
There is an interesting feature article over at Reuters about how, as a result of the financial crisis and the rigid labour market laws of much of the continent, millions of young Europeans leaving school and college face a bleak future over the next few years. Even during the relatively prosperous period of the Nineties and much of the ‘Noughties, youth unemployment in nations such as France was shockingly high, sometimes into double figures. Europe’s failure to create a large number of private sector jobs remains one of the most damning facts about the continent’s economic record over the past quarter of a century.
Following the dreadful news about the Italian earthquake, this blog about Italy contains a mass of links to charities and organisations helping with the recovery effort in the stricken area. I have some distant Italian relations who live not far away from the area although fortunately they are all okay.
The Labour blogger Tom Harris is upset that the Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, dared – oh the impertinence! – to attack Gordon Brown the other day. The horror. A politician attacks another politician and about policies too – what is the world coming to? But as Alex Massie puts it, this is tosh, and Mr Harris, if he has any self respect, must surely know it. It also makes me wonder what Mr Harris thinks MEPs should do, or if they have any rights at all to criticise leaders of the countries whence they come?
I have often watched, in recent times, Labour ministers berate opposition politicians for “playing politics” for having the temerity to criticise some policy or other. This is a totalitarian mindset. In an adversarial system such as the Anglosphere one, rhetorical combat and debate is all part of the system and a necessary part, as well. It is probably also a sign of how the ruling UK Labour Party is now frightened that, when confronted with an example of blazing eloquence by a European MP like Mr Hannan, the best that NuLab can do is moan about the MP’s “lack of patriotism”.
At this blog, over the years, we have argued long and hard about the dire state of the Tory Party and the sort of people that have advanced within. I am sure that libertarian purists will be able to unearth unflattering political details about Mr Hannan. But in the current environment, his speech – now a YouTube phenomenon – is like a dash of brandy to a half-drowned man. I hope it galvanizes his colleagues to follow suit.
When it comes to drowning, the gurgling guy you see vanishing beneath the waves is Gordon Brown. Developments such as the insufficient bids for UK government bonds suggest the end is now very close.
Reuters, last month:
LONDON, Jan 26 – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned on Monday against a retreat into financial protectionism as the global economic downturn gathers pace.
With sterling near record lows against the yen and 23-year lows against the dollar, Brown also reiterated that his government policy was not built around currency exchange rates.
“We have not yet seen the same protectionism in trade with beggar-thy-neighbour policies of the ’30s,” he told reporters, referring to the Great Depression. “And I will fight hard to ensure we do not. But we also need to ensure we do not exercise a new form of financial mercantilism of retreat into domestic lending and domestic financial markets.
Reuters, this month, from Berlin:
BERLIN, Feb 22 – European leaders meeting in Berlin on Sunday have backed oversight of all financial markets and products, including hedge funds, and urged that sanctions be drawn up to punish tax havens, according to a final statement seen by Reuters.
Where was Gordon? Apparently he was there. Perhaps he has changed his mind about financial mercantilism in the meantime.
Following on from Perry’s post below, I am pleased to note that there is something we can do to help Geert Wilders.
For those among you who want to actively help, go to his website and donate what you can to help defray what will likely be a ruinous legal bill. The link is here.
Geert Wilders is one of the pitifully few public figures in Europe who is willing to confront the Islamist menace. As a result, his enemies have sentenced him to death (because all they want is peace, don’t you know) and his own government has decided to prosecute him.
Even if you cannot contribute financially then I urge you at least to get a message to him to let him know that he is not alone and that he has many, many friends. He needs them.
A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.
The three judges said that they had weighed Mr Wilders’s “one-sided generalisations” against his right to free speech, and ruled that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians.
“The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs,” the court said in a statement.
“The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders,” it added.
This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation’s reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber.
So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam… up yours.
And as a little bonus…
The EU is bleating as people go cold due to Russian gas being shut off due to its disputes with the Ukraine. And the ever dependable Russian polity, moonbats to a man, blame the USA for the crisis.
The pragmatic Slovak government has made the very sensible decision to possibly restart Soviet era nuclear power plants that they were decommissioning as part of their accession to the EU, if the crisis drags on… and in doing so, they show the simple and ‘carbon footprint’ friendly (as if I care) solution to this and oh so many problems… nuclear power. How can a solution that dooms both the Kremlin and Middle East to long term strategic insignificance not be a Truly Many Splendored Thing?
I have just returned from a short business trip to Geneva in Switzerland and apart from the usual chatter about the disasters that have befallen the banking system – including such titans as UBS – the chatter in the cafes was about voters’ recent decision to allow heroin to be given to drug addicts in medical centres. Switzerland’s experiments with a more liberal approach to drug use has not been without unfortunate result: I remember that some time ago, there was a park in Zurich that got the unfortunate title, “needle park”, on account of the number of folk who used to congregate there from all over to get their fix of heroin. But perhaps that is a sort of example of how, if you have “public spaces” – owned by the nation and hence owned by no-one in particular – what might be a matter of private behaviour can lead to “negative externalities”. The solution, maybe, is for drug users to indulge their habits on private property with the consent of the owners of said; then the issue ceases to be one on which the polity feels a need to express a view one way or the other.
But the Swiss are nothing if not contradictory and the locals do not seem to share a very coherent conception of what the state can or should be able to tell people to do, but I do sense that there is less of a nanny state culture than in Britain. The locals tell me that there is, still, more of a culture of self-responsibility than in some other European nations. But the contradictions are odd: while approving the heroin measure, Swiss electors rejected a proposal to make marijuana legal and to be able to grow it for personal use. And yet this is a nation where smoking continues to happen in restaurants; firearms ownership is far more liberal than in the UK; ditto things like knives and swords; bank secrecy, while not quite as solid as before, remains; and the nation, to its credit, remains cussedly uninterested in joining the EU or allowing itself to be bullied by tax collectors in places such as Germany and the US.
And the chocolate tastes pretty good as well. Yummm…..
William Rees-Mogg has a nice, rather wistful account of the days of when bank managers actually knew their clients, knew their economic circumstances and were not in the business of lending money to folk with little or no credit history. Mr Rees-Mogg is a devotee of the gold standard. However, in talking about the changing nature of banks and the quality of their staff, he does not touch on an issue which struck me the other day: limited liability.
Under limited liability laws and with central bankers acting as lenders of last resort, there is an element of moral hazard. Some free marketeers like Sean Gabb – whom I mention below – think limited liability laws are a statist curse on the capitalist system, since they would not arise without active state adjustments of corporate law. I am not sure about whether limited liability would exist in a world of pure laissez faire. It might, I guess. Also, not everyone buys the idea that LL is a distortion of the market or would not exist without state action.
However, there are still some nooks and crannies of the banking world where unlimited liability still exists and works successfully. The Swiss private bank Pictet, founded in 1805 in that memorable Napoleonic battle year of Austerlitz and Trafalgar, operates a partnership system where the bank partners face unlimited liability. As a result, Pictet operates a very conservative lending and investment policy. During the fat years of the ‘Noughties, Pictet may have seen some of its more aggressive competitors steal a march, but now the bank is attracting inflows from investors who appreciate the structure of the firm. At a time when Swiss banks have sometimes attracted bad headlines due to massive losses undertaken by over-confident people, the example of Pictet is an interesting contrast.
Yours truly escaped from the credit crunch, his computer keyboard and endless work hassles to get some much-needed relaxation in the Greek island of Crete last week. I can strongly recommend it, although not all aspects of life in that island are an unalloyed joy (they seem to assume that British tourists want chips with everything). I noticed that the locals have an agreeably “f**k you” approach to things like any smoking bans in restaurants, at least judging by my own observations. And I noticed that the driving standards have not improved much since I was last in Greece in 1992. A taxi driver who took me and the missus to the airport held a mobile phone in his hand, had innumerable phone calls and was busily texting his wife/mistress/whoever during a drive down a twisty lane. At one point I even suggested that this might not be a bright idea. I might as well have been talking to a martian.
Of course, such things are foolish and silly. And using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous. But maybe what has happened is not that the Greeks have got any nuttier or more reckless. It is that we Brits have, wittingly or otherwise, become even more safety conscious and worried about risk. Sometimes it takes a passage of time and a contrast with another culture to realise that.
Here is a comment at Coffee House on this posting:
Brown will pull a rabbit out of his hat. He will declare that he will hold a referendum on the UK being IN or OUT of the EU! He will promise to accept the decision and make policy changes following the result!
SUCH a policy, such a move would instantly wipe the smiles off the Tories as we will have the spectacle of Cameron/Osborne etc in the IN camp and forever losing their eurosceptic labels!
Brown knows that being out of the EU will bring in massive investment and also save the country billions.
Expect this in late Autumn.
This is from “alan” and is comment number nine, at 8.09am. As a political prophecy I think it is barking moonbattery. But as a description of economic reality, does what alan says, suicide note capitals and all (“SUCH a policy”), perhaps have merit?
I have long believed that leaving the EU would be good for Britain’s economy, quite aside from such incidentals as the rule of law rather versus rule by the mere say-so of rulers, and in due course getting dragged into whatever European civil wars accompany the eventual break-up of the EU. But I have tended to assume that leaving the EU in the nearer future would inevitably involve a period of economic bad news, during which the associated dislocations – and the EU’s enraged punishments – would be immediate, but during which the clear eventual benefits to Britain’s economy would be somewhat slower to materialise.
However, would leaving the EU be a short-term fix for Britain’s present economic woes? Would it have the immediate benefits that alan claims for it? If so, that would be a meme worth getting behind.
UPDATE: Some interesting EUro-commentary from Guido.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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