20 January 2007

There is no escaping activist judges

It is bad enough, despite six years of George Bush appointments to Federal judgeships in the US which have gone some way to resolve the problem, that America is littered with activist judges overstepping their bounds and trying to tell the executive branch that they can't do things that they really, really want to do. Now it seems that these judges have family members in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights has found Russia guilty of torture in the case of two Chechnyan brothers. According to the judgement:

"The applicants were indisputably kept in a permanent state of physical pain and anxiety owing to their uncertainty about their fate and to the level of violence to which they were subjected throughout the period of their detention...The Court considers that such treatment was intentionally inflicted on the applicants by agents of the State acting in the course of their duties with the aim of extracting from them a confession or information about the offences of which they were suspected."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the court, quite rightly in my opinion, of being political.

Surely there must be somewhere safe from this judicial tyranny like Iraq, Burma , Zimbabwe or Fiji.

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