Judges v Politicians

Some controversial judicial decisions have raised alarm amongst Westminster politicians and are worth examining. The first is the decision of the European Court of Human Rights requiring British prisoners to be given the vote. The second is the decision of the British Supreme Court that persons on the Sex Offenders Register should have the right to appeal against their continued inclusion on the register. It has taken politicians a long time to wake up to the anti-democratic agenda of the courts.

With regard to the prisoner voting issue, we know from the recent past that not all prisoners actually committed the offence for which they were convicted, that some prisoners should not be there because their offence does not warrant a prison sentence, and that some prisoners are there for actions which should not be criminal at all. With these caveats in place there can be no grounds whatsoever for allowing prisoners the vote. They should not be granted an input into the law making process, since they have shown contempt for the law by actions which in most cases are seriously criminal. In short these people are outlaws, and it is perfectly reasonable that they are treated as such during their time behind bars.

On the matter of the Sex Offenders Register it is unclear why this is needed in the first place. It is a relatively recent creation and breaches the traditional principle that once a sentence has been served, the guilty have paid their debt to society. They should not have to continue paying it. We do not have registers for murderers, for violent offenders, for muggers, for fraudsters or for burglars, all regarded by most people as serious or very serious offences.

The Sex Offenders Register includes those convicted of very serious offences such as the violent rape of a stranger, or the sexual molestation of children under the age of puberty, for which the perpetrators can rightly expect a long prison sentence when caught. It also includes people who should never have come before the courts, such as older youths having physical relations with a younger teenage girlfriend. Both categories are lumped together, and in some deranged minds are treated as equally wrong.

The reason we have a Sex Offenders Register is because, unlike other serious criminal offences, some sex crimes such as rape have been politicised, and others have become the focus of mass hysteria caused by the paedophile scare. Virtually everyone on the register is male and it is very difficult to believe that a register that included the same proportion of females would be tolerated. Sex crimes can change over time, for example until relatively recently a male engaging in what was quaintly termed a 'gross indecency' with a fifteen year old girl committed no offence, but he did if it was with a seventeen year old youth. Now the positions have been reversed. It is difficult to understand why such relatively harmless activity should be a matter for the courts, or the self righteous pontificating of zealous officialdom.