Secret justice is no justice at all

Why do free nations grant their citizens the right not to be arbitrarily arrested and detained?

In the dark old days, when the only rights a person had were those he could win with his sword (I use the masculine pronoun advisedly, because women had near to no rights at all), the authorities, such as they were, could punish opposition by simply locking it away. Because there was no means to compel the government to explain why it had done so, short of rebellion, it was an effective way to silence dissent.

In short, the right to be free from arbitrary arrest underpins the right to free expression. (It is also true that the compulsion upon a government to present you when it is served a writ of habeas corpus prevents it from extrajudicially murdering you without anyone's knowing. If the government cannot answer "let us have the body", you can be sure it has disposed of the body in question.)

Those who join insurrections against their native state may well be traitors, they may well be criminals, and they may well be too dangerous to allow liberty. But we have processes to determine that, freely and openly. We do it in a courtroom where the evidence is presented for all to see, where a jury of your peers -- and as a citizen, even an insurrectionary, has other citizens as his or her peers -- decides your guilt. This serves us. This protects us from capricious authorities that might take it upon themselves to pursue justice that is personal to them (making the authorities unequal before the law, of course, because they have recourse to systems of justice that others do not).


This is wrong. We have said it many times before: if we are fighting for "values" in a "noble cause", we have to ask what those values actually are. If they do not include the right to protection from arbitrary arrest and equality before the law (if you bring a suit against someone at law, you cannot generally claim that your evidence is "secret" and therefore cannot be heard in public -- it should not be forgotten that equality extends also to the government, who are our servants, not our masters, and are also bound by the law in the same way we are), what do they include?

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:50 am