Habeas Corpus is a basic principle of British justice. It prevents the state from locking you up without having to persuade a court that it has good reason for doing so. It is vital to any decent system of law.
The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) is a direct breach of Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus is virtually unknown on the continent of Europe. In many countries it is routine to detain suspects and only then to start investigating the crime – if one was actually committed. People can be kept in gaol without charge or trial for a year or more. And when they are released, because no case can be made against them, they have no redress.
In much of Europe, there is no jury system that we would recognise. In the few cases in which juries are used, they do not have total independence to make up their own minds, free of instructions from judges, and to acquit in defiance of the facts and the law if they believe the law to be wrong.
Under the EAW, you can be arrested and transported to one of these countries without any assessment of the claims made against you by a British court. They don’t even have to show that it is a crime in this country. There is no attempt made to verify that the claims are not frivolous, malicious or corrupt (click to see more clearly)
If that doesn’t concern you, it should.
It used to concern EU-Quisling Cast-iron Dave. When he was in opposition, he called the EAW “utterly objectionable“, but that was probably just another ‘sincerely and deeply held belief’ that could be jettisoned in the name of political expediency.
But Cast-iron Dave has gone even further in slaughtering British justice on the altar of ‘ever closer union’. Another principle of British justice is that you’re innocent until proved guilty. But Dave enthusiastically supports HMRC’s plan to be able to raid the bank accounts of people the bungling HMRC believe owe tax without obtaining a court order. We used to be innocent of tax avoidance until HMRC could prove us guilty. Now we can all be found guilty by HMRC (without any court order), they can confiscate our money with little to no proof of wrongdoing and it will then be up to us to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds and possibly several years trying to prove our innocence.
But don’t worry. These new powers will never be used against the likes of Amazon, Google, Starbucks or any of Dave’s tax-avoiding mates in the City. After all, the wealthy and powerful have the resources to challenge HMRC in the courts and win.
No, the new powers will only be used to ruin ordinary people, usually because the recidivist incompetents at HMRC have made a total cock-up of their tax calculations. HMRC believes the new powers will allow them to collect a few hundred million extra in tax. HMRC could collect an awful lot more if they took action against some of the firms in the chart above.
As for British justice which used to protect the individual against abuse of power by the state. Well, in the new EUSSR, we can all be found guilty with little to no proof and our protections against an ever more totalitarian state are being stripped away by our rulers who believe we exist to serve their interests rather than the other way round.
I agree with what you say here David, I made the same observation in that piece in the Telegraph yesterday…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10819885/David-Cameron-Taxes-will-rise-unless-we-can-raid-bank-accounts.html
However, although I accept that no corporation tax has been paid by some of these companies into the UK treasury, that is not due to any great “tax avoidance” scheme… These corporations are merely responding in the most efficient manner for their shareholders to EU commercial law.
The EU is supposed to be a single market, and as such a corporation treats the EU as a single market, it has its main base in the member state with the cheapest corporation tax rates, which is often Luxembourg, or Ireland… However, I understand that currently it is the UK…
I will not be surprised if more of them follow suit and start paying their tax here instead of Ireland or Luxembourg.
I have no time for the concept of huge corporations grown fat because the politicians bend over backwards (can’t think why) to make it easy for multinational corporations to thrive. Instead I direct my ire at the anti-democratic EC/EU that has designed its hideous system to be anti-citizen and pro-idealistic mumbo jumbo.
Every empire ends in the same way… I don’t know why the politicians think that it will be different this time.
A couple of years ago I retired, and returned to the uk to live out my few remaining years. I am sorry to say that I have made a very grave mistake; England is no longer my country, the laws are made somewhere else by people I have never heard of, and I am not allowed to voice any opinions as I might ‘upset’ someone, somewhere, no matter how benign or reasonable that opinion may be. So I am going back, where the laws are made by politicians I vote for, not some faceless entity whose name I can’t even pronounce, or who wasn’t even elected. Where I have a reasonable standard of living and, do not pay outrageous taxes and fees to enrich the aforementioned bureaucrats and so called politicians.
Bureaucrats and politicians should be changed at the same frequency as nappys.