I have been studying the judgement of the British High Court on the case brought by David Miranda et al against the Home Secretary et al as a result of his having been detained for nine hours under terrorist laws when he passed through the UK en route from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro.
There is enough meat in this judgement for several articles, but I’ll restrict myself to one. One thing is apparent: the police on the ground at Heathrow Airport were clearly not convinced that they had the power to act under the infamous paragraph 7. The office on duty questioned the request twice, and only after the second time did the intelligence services change the wording of the request to indicate that Miranda was suspected of being involved in terrorist activity.
Even the court indicated that the wording of the law, was extremely wide on the subject of what constitutes terrorist activity and the right to stop and question travellers passing through, and it seems equally clear to anyone not steeped in the dots and commas of legalese that this was not a genuine case of suspected terrorism but a trumped up play with words to create the maximum amount of intimidation for Miranda and by association in the journalists for whose material he was courier.
And this brings me to my point. Various governments, principally the US and UK governments have always held forth that their security agencies act legally. Even that statement has been questioned, whereupon the governments refer to secret decisions of secret courts.
But the point is that anything a government puts into law is by definition legal. If a government wrote into law that all male children born on December 25 should be put to death, that would, by definition, be law and any deaths resulting would be legal.
It seems to me that having regard to the wide interpretation upon illegal activity and the wide scope allowed to the forces of law and order, not to mention the frequency with which the citizens of the country take a back seat by comparison with government and commerce, that we can no longer trust our governments when it comes to making laws.
Now clearly governments have to make laws. But a solution to this might be that all laws must be referred to a court of citizens before they can be made law. In this way perhaps the common sense of ordinary people can weigh down the reality-fleeing flights of fancy of our lawmakers.
Perhaps one could have a rotating system similar to the system for jury duty? I would not like to suggest anything to which members have to be elected, for then one has a tendency to get the people who want to be elected, and merely created a second chamber of lawmakers.