UK Seeks To Hold Terrorism Trial In Secret 240
hazeii (5702) writes in with news about a secret trial set to take place in England. 'A major terrorism trial is set to be held entirely in secret for the first time in British legal history in an unprecedented departure from the principles of open justice, the court of appeal has heard. The identities of the two defendants charged with serious terror offences are being withheld from the public, and the media are banned from being present in court to report the forthcoming trial against the two men, known only as AB and CD.'
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
My theory is because currently terrorism still has a bit of 'awe' factor behind it. Treating these cases like any other case would diminish that.
If that's the case, then we've gone backwards in the last year. I was incredibly relieved when the CPS decided to charge Lee Rigby's murderers [wikipedia.org] with murder, rather than elevating them to terrorists. This meant that they could be shut down when they started sprouting their insane bullshit - which is what happened during the trial.
When that happened, I thought we'd started to reach a turning point - that terrorism wasn't a simple way of getting us to agree with policies - and I haven't received or heard any of the ridiculous ACPO* [wikipedia.org] "suspect your neighbour" leaflets. We do have an election coming up next year, so maybe that's the reason.
The sane way to deal with this would be to charge them attempted murder, thereby making any political statements irrelevant to the trial.
* The ACPO is tentatively a non-profit organisation, but they do like to lobby and earn cash for selling records at 11667% of cost (£70 for a 60p cost)
Re:Secret courts are the stuff of dictatorships (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Major Not (Score:1, Interesting)
Educate the women. Their role in reducing religious fanatacism, and educing the birthrate that creates flocks of angry, unemployed young men without jobs who participate in Jihad, is enormous.
Re:Dear UK (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Canada it is the government leading the safety thing and the people demanding privacy. They keep introducing legislation to give more powers to the police etc, things like being able to go to ISPs and demand names and the people keep screaming no. Terrorism, child porn and this time, cyberbullying. Unluckily the public slowly gets worn down, the new powers are attached to other legislation and it looks like they may succeed this time around.
Thing is this government, who got voted in on a transparency promise, is the most secretive government ever and freaks out when their privacy is broken. The former Public Safety Minister (WTF?) accused everyone of being for child molesters while trying to pass his new law and then freaked when his public divorce proceeding, including how he was screwing the babysitter for 8 years, was publicized.
They really seem to go on the principal that everyone is as crooked as they are.