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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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