eurealist.co.uk

Lord Steyn attacks fellow law lord over Guantanamo Bay detainees:

“Courts must never abdicate their duty to protect citizens from the abuse of power by governments, a senior judge said last night.”

In a highly unusual move, he launched a public attack on Lord Hoffmann, a fellow law lord, for suggesting that the courts should not interfere with certain Government decisions.

On the contrary, Lord Steyn told a group of lawyers and judges in Belfast, it was the “democratic and constitutional duty of judges to stand up where necessary for individuals against the Government”.

“If the judges of today teach a new generation of lawyers, and judges, that complaisance by the judiciary to the views of the legislature and the executive in policy areas is the best way forward, one of the pillars of our democracy will have been weakened,” he added in a lecture to the Judicial Studies Board.
“In troubled times there is an ever present danger of the seductive but misconceived judicial mindset that ‘after all, we are on the same side as the Government’.”
This, he said, was a “slippery slope which tends to sap the will of judges to face up to a government guilty of abuse of power”. Even democratic governments sometimes abused their powers and needed to face open and effective justice, he said.

Perhaps if this view had been prevalent at any time during the last 30 years Britain would not now be in the mess of the EU. It is all well and good Lord Steyn making this stand, and well past time some Judge did so, but oddly he has chosen to make it over the case of the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Judges all seem quite happy to ignore their “democratic and constitutional duty” as they stand by and watch the British Constitution being totally destroyed. What about the right of the rest of us, under the EU arrest warrant any one of us can be arrested in our own home and carted of to any other country to face charged for crimes which are not an offence in Britain. It would be nice to think that a law Lord might wish to point out in passing, that this is against the British Constitution, we owe allegiance from birth to the British Crown, and it in return owes us the right to be tried by a jury of our peers under our laws and protection in our own homes from a foreign power, thousands have died standing up for this this principal. None of us asked to become Citizens of the EU and therefore our Government have no right to force this citizenship on us against our will, and neither does the EU have the right to then take over powers of government and act as if we the people of Britain owe it our allegiance and must obey its law it is about time our Judges really did start to fulfil their “democratic and constitutional duty”.