Goodbye Habeas Corpus and British justice in the EUSSR

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.