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Re: Pete Diary
There are hopefully people far more qualified than me on the list to
explain
this , but anyone at all interested in this could have a look at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lawf0013/P'SOV199.htm
Thanks for the link, Tom, but does this apply? I read some of the law that
Pete was supposed to have broken, but it was just excerpts, I expect, and I
didn't see anything about it being retroactively effective. Doesn't it have
to be stated within the law that it covers prior offenses? Whatever, this
must be what Roger is complaining about when he says Pete's civil rights
were violated, as the UK is now expected to conform to the European
Convention on Human Rights. (Isn't that right?) Here's the pertinent
paragraph from the document you've linked:
Retrospective legislation is a clear indication of the legal sovereignty of
parliament. It is widely criticised as contrary to the Rule of Law [e.g.
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, p 270] and retrospective criminal
liability is contrary to Article 7 of the European Convention of Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Some commentators have regarded such
legislation as "impossible". Blackstone, for example, took the view that
parliamentary legislation was necessarily prospective, because it is
impossible to direct a man now to behave differently than he did then. As
against which there is nothing impossible about visiting a sanction now on
someone whose conduct was not known to attract such a sanction at the time
it occurred. It is, however, obviously unfair.
This effort to retroactively apply laws is something that Paul Reubens is
fighting in his child porn case, as well. He is a collector of vintage
porn, and the archive siezed by the police predates the laws and so should
not be covered.
There is a certain backlash going on in the US over child molestation cases.
This week a large group of convictions were overturned when the US Supreme
Court reinstated the statute of limitations that control how far back cases
can be prosecuted. Some of the cases dated from the 1950s, and the justices
wrote that this was too long to expect anyone to bring forward evidence for
a defense.
keets
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