Samizdata

I found this on Gay.com UK, so the language may be a bit distorted (e.g the phrase ‘the Pope’s anti-gay document…) but still worth a post:

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.

Any clergy found handling the 12-page document, released last week as a statement of the Catholic Church’s response to gay marriages, will face charges under the country’s hatred legislation reports suggest.

Although the document itself is not illegal, it could lead to an increase in hatred, the Council said, and by stirring up hatred in the parish, the clergy could face jail terms of six months.

According to their website the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is an independent governmental organisation promoting and defending human rights and civil liberties.

Update: Here is the same news from Irish Times quoting Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the ICCL:

The document itself may not violate the Act, but if you were to use the document to say that gays are evil, it is likely to give rise to hatred, which is against the Act. The wording is very strong and certainly goes against the spirit of the legislation.

Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn’t automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn’t know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.

A man accused of storing child pornography on his computer has been cleared after it emerged that his computer had been infected by a Trojan horse, which was responsible for transferring the images onto his PC.

[XXXX XXXX] … was taken into custody last October after police with a search warrant raided his house. He then spent a night in a police cell, nine days in Exeter prison and three months in a bail hostel. During this time, his ex-wife won custody of his seven year old daughter and possession of his house.

In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right.

This Telegraph piece by John Mortimer is a characteristic mixture of good ideas and bad ideas, of humbug and whatever is the opposite of humbug. I’m sure that all White Rose readers would (a) agree with that characterisation, but (b) argue fiercely about which bit is humbug and which not. Which is the whole idea of this blog. Nevertheless I’d file it under White-Rose-relevant, so here are a few sample paragraphs to make that point:

So, through much of my life, I have witnessed what seemed to be a slow but measurable improvement in the administration of the law. That improvement was to continue, strangely enough, only until the advent of a Labour Government that seemed to have been born without a single civil libertarian instinct.

So now jury trials are to be diminished, previous convictions will be allowed in evidence so defendants will be convicted on what they did in the past, the presumption of innocence has been severely dented and the great principle that a guilty act must contain a guilty intention will be held not to apply in rape cases.

The right to habeas corpus has been denied in certain cases, where suspects may now be held in prison without the hope of trial or charges levelled against them. Just as shamefully, Tony Blair seems about to agree that British subjects should be subjected to what is a parody of a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay. Our great constitutional liberties, struggled for down the centuries, are now being denied.

The righteous wrath of Rumpole will be raised by the intention of the Home Secretary to remove sentencing from judges and hand it over to the vote-hungry hands of politicians anxious, as judges are not, to score political points and please the newspapers.

And so on and so forth. Read at will. Agree, and disagree.

Here’s a link to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the War on Terror.

So you think there’s no chance that you’d be quizzed by FBI agents about what you read or who you pal around with?

Well, just ask Atlantan Marc Shultz, who works in an Atlanta bookstore. According to an account Shultz wrote in Creative Loafing, he was interrogated by two FBI agents because he’d been reported as reading something suspicious in a coffee shop.

That suspicious something was an article by Hal Crowther, “Weapons of Mass Stupidity,” in a Tampa alternative newsweekly. The Crowther piece is a scathing criticism of corporate media, such as Fox News, in the post-Sept. 11 environment.

Atlanta FBI spokesman Joe Paris wouldn’t comment on the Shultz story or even confirm it. He merely said, “We have an obligation to follow up on any information we get of a terrorist-type nature.”
A terrorist-type nature?

There’s an important principle involved here. Well, plenty of principles, but one in particular that strikes me. It’s the combination of individuals being allowed – and I’m guessing: encouraged – to inform the authorities of their suspicions, and the obligation – that’s the word FBI man Paris uses: obligation – to investigate the matter. This means that person X who has, for some reason of his own, taken a dislike to person Y can invent some plausible suspicions about Y and phone them in, and the powers that be have to be all over Y with their investigations.

Practised political stirrers aren’t going to be too bothered, and may even rather enjoy it. Either way they will exploit it all for the publicity and the fifteen minutes of fame, the way this Marc Shultz guy seems to be doing, and good for him. But for other less public souls, this could surely be very bad.

I mustn’t exaggerate, but this is the sort of thing that happened in Stalin’s Russia, in logical structure even if not remotely as bad in scale or intensity. In place of a decade in an arctic camp ending in premature death, substitute a week or two of anxieties at the hands of the government, and maybe a rather scary legal bill because you figured, best let my lawyer keep track of all this.

The point is the authorities not having any power to drop the matter, but being obligated to go through the motions demanded. To begin with, the policemen doing this are only doing it because they have to. But what we are liable to end up with is an altogether different kind of policeman, the kind of policeman who really likes these scenarios, who truly believes that scaring regular citizens half to death is the heart and soul of good government.

White Rose seems to have missed this (from the BBC on Wednesday):

A group of peace protesters has launched legal proceedings against Gloucestershire police, claiming they used anti-terrorism laws to prevent demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

The complaints centre on RAF Fairford, where American B-52 bombers were based during the conflict.

None of the protesters who demonstrated at the airbase were charged with terrorism offences but they say their human rights were breached.

The pressure group Liberty is calling for an inquiry into the use of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at the base.

Officers were granted powers under the legislation to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians in the area near the base between 7 March and 27 April.

But they were obviously all really dangerous people, yes? Absolutely.

One of the people the group says was stopped under the Terrorism act was 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, whose father David Cockcroft is taking legal action claiming a breach of human rights.

Isabelle told the BBC: “We were just walking along the road and they stopped us. I did not have a full body search because there was no woman officer there.

“They asked what was in our pockets, wrote down our descriptions and checked a backpack and a bike we had with us.

“They said they were stopping us under the Terrorism Act, but I’m not a terrorist.”

I guess you just can’t be too careful.

Don’t get me wrong. I personally don’t care at all for peaceniks, and I especially dislike them when they have hyphenated surnames. Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft should be swooning over plasticated pop musicians in preparation for doing It-Girl Studies at Roedean, not demo-ing outside an airbase.

But I will defend the right of hyphenated peaceniks to demonstrate without being arrested as terrorists to the point of putting up a posting about it on White Rose.

Thanks to Chris R. Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up the story.