Reviews for EU Law

The average rating for EU Law based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-10-10 00:00:00 Hiroki Tsujikami One of the things I liked about Britain's being in the EU was having an extra layer of legal appeal that lay above the level of the nation-state. This is of course exactly what many anti-Europe campaigners hate most, but from my experience of Europe these myriad rulings about flammable duvets and transporting hazardous substances, all hashed out quietly by experts far away from the media pressure of any particular country, were generally sensible and politically unpartisan. When (dare I say if) the UK does leave Europe, all of that legislation will disappear and some army of bureaucrats will have to recreate most of it again under British law. Fortunately we will, at least as far as I can tell, still be signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, whose court in Strasbourg has already helped several Brits whose rights were not satisfactorily upheld by British rulings. (Edit - in point of fact, the Home Secretary has already said that she wants us to withdraw from the ECHR after Brexit.) The fact that EU member-states are required to sign this convention is one of the many reasons the Union has been such a force for good, as can be seen from the many former Eastern Bloc countries that bent over backwards to commit to 'the rule of law and respect for human rights' in order to join. That phrase 'the rule of law', written into the EU's Copenhagen criteria, is a cliché that covers a lot of ground, and this small, lucid book is an attempt to set down what exactly it means to most people and why it matters. Lord Bingham was, until his death in 2010, the most senior as well as the most eminent judge in Britain, and before that was typically described as the greatest lawyer of his generation. Like only the true masters in any field, he distils the complexities of his subject into the most wonderfully simple, jargon-free, crystal-clear prose that could be understood by any smart twelve-year-old. Particularly useful is the brief run-down of key historical landmarks in establishing the principles of western law, from Magna Carta in 1215, through Bills of Rights both British (1689) and American (1791), down to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Progress has been slow and incremental and sometimes rather two-steps-forward-one-step-back. It wasn't, for instance, until 1836 that defence counsel was allowed to address the jury directly on the defendant's behalf - in fact one judge in his memoirs recalls a conviction of theft that took place after a trial lasting all of two minutes fifty-three seconds, including the economical jury direction: 'Gentlemen, I suppose you have no doubt? I have none.' The historical context proves to be quite illuminating when it comes to contemporary debates. In the seventeenth century, for instance, Charles II's chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon, had a habit of transferring political prisoners to outlying parts of the United Kingdom where the writ of habeas corpus did not run, and where he could therefore hold people indefinitely. After his fall from power, it was felt that this practice should somehow be prevented, and the result was the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act 1679 - an Act which only just got through the House of Lords, by the way, supposedly because the person counting the ayes 'succeeded, without his opposite number noticing, in counting a very fat Lord as 10'. Bingham uses this story to discuss Guantánamo Bay, a facility set up to do exactly what the Earl of Clarendon did and for the same reasons, and which has seen the same tussle between the executive and the judiciary in the US that Britain went through in the 1600s. Bingham is, indeed, quite worried about roll-backs in people's legal rights, particularly following President Bush's declaration of a War on Terror (this book was written as Obama was being elected). He stresses, for instance, the vital importance that national laws should protect non-nationals (a matter of 'equality before the law'); this is not just for their own sake, but also because curtailing the rights of non-nationals has so often been the prelude to denying the same rights to citizens. This is very much a live issue. The USA PATRIOT Act, for example, denied foreigners basic rights of political association, due process and privacy; in the UK, meanwhile, new legislation after 9/11 meant that foreigners suspected of terrorism could be held indefinitely but British nationals accused of the same thing could not. Bingham clearly feels that detention without trial is one of the key issues that has been eroded in recent years. In Britain in 1997 the maximum time someone suspected of terrorism could be held without charge was four days. In 2000 it was seven days; in 2003 fourteen days; in 2006 twenty-eight days. Subsequent attempts to raise it further to forty-two or even ninety days have so far been defeated in Parliament. American activities have been an order of magnitude larger and more concerning, with the Pentagon said to have conceded that some 80,000 people have been detained in various 'black' sites around the world, some on no charge at all. Various Supreme Court decision have spanked the administration over its behaviour - Rasul v Bush , Hamdan v Rumsfeld , Boumediene v Bush are key - as legislators attempted to stay one step ahead by creating new laws which would make outrages more technically permissible. The same could be said for torture, which was redefined in such a way as to allow, at least tacitly, what later happened at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Obama rolled some of this back, but of course Guantánamo is still a constant affront to many of the basic rights that, until recently, the United States had resolutely stood for, including the right to a fair trial, habeas corpus, the rejection of torture, and so on. This is how a great country can very easily surrender its previous claims to moral authority. Bingham casts a lot of this debate, with great clarity, as an ancient and long-running showdown between Cicero's maxim Salus populi suprema est lex ('the safety of the people is the supreme law') and what he describes as the 'preferable' stance of Benjamin Franklin, that 'he who would put security before liberty deserves neither'. He applies this to an interesting discussion of recent surveillance legislation, although events have moved on so quickly since this book was published, with Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA, that you'll need to supplement these parts with some more contemporary reading. Overall this is a very, very clear outline of what people are entitled to expect from legislative frameworks, and how we got there. It convinced me again of the importance of having supra-national bodies that can hold countries to account, at least in theory - but more than that it's just a pleasure to read, and should give you a good basis for working out your own thoughts about how courts work, how justice is pursued, and how countries behave on the international stage.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-03 00:00:00 William Crane The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers - Dick, a rebel, in Henry the 6th Part Two by William Shakespeare * When I read this sentence: If you maltreat a penguin in the London Zoo, you do not escape prosecution because you are the Archbishop of Canterbury. I conceived that Baron (call me Tom) Bingham of Cornhill, former Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and a Senior Law Lord might be the ideal guide through the unclear conglomerations of legal definition and public conduct which lay ahead. This was emphasised when he quoted his favourite attempt by a legislator to define exactly what he meant - this is from the 1979 Banking Act Appeals Procedure (England and Wales) : Any reference in these regulations to a regulation is a reference to a regulation contained in these regulations. However what follows in the next 174 pages has very few laughs. It's essential, but so, so dry I cannot in conscience recommend this book unless you are submerged up to your chin in very wet water. He takes us through the major milestones : Magna Carta 1215 Habeas Corpus 1305 amended 1679 Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement 1689 and 1701 Constitution of the USA 1787 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Paris, 1789 Bill of Rights, USA, 1791 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 It fair makes your head swim, all these goodlyhearted people trying to abolish torture and arbitrary imprisonment and rats and scurvy and no maltreatment of any penguin anywhere ever under pain of no pain. But what do we mean by the rule of law? * A state which savagely represses or persecutes sections of its people cannot in my view be regarded as observing the rule of law, even if the transport of the persecuted minority to the concentration camp or the compulsory exposure of female children on the mountainside is the subject of detailed laws duly enacted and scrupulously observed. We recall how the Nazis had genealogical experts to go through people's family history to determine if they should be killed - heaven forbid that they should accidentally gas an Aryan! Similar exactness was observed in apartheid South Africa when assigning people to the correct ethnic group. So just because you have a set of laws which you then follow exactly, that does not create the rule of law. This law of which we desire the rule of is a specific type : Western liberal. Zut alors, the rest of the book explains how Western governments spout all this goodlyhearted stuff through their mouths whilst trying to bend their own self-imposed rules whenever the shoe pinches, and thanks to a sorry parade of ne'er-do-wells from commie pinkos, wild IRA nutjobs and on right up to the currently foaming tide of jihadi Johns, the shoe pinches almost continually. And so the dark arts of redefining torture, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, control orders, Guantanamo Bays and all the way up to illegal invasions of sovereign countries gets the go ahead with just a little soft-shoe-shuffling at the United Nations and the Supreme Court. (The British Sun newspaper celebrates the sinking of the Argentinian ship the Belgrano in 1982 with the loss of 382 lives. It was sailing away from the war zone at the time.) * A good part of this book grapples with the notion of human rights, which is indeed thorny. He says This [human rights] is a difficult area since there is no universal consensus on the rights and freedoms which are fundamental, even among civilised nations. And as an immediate example : The right to life has been described as the most fundamental of all rights, and it is indeed obvious that unless a person is alive he or she can enjoy no other rights. You can immediately hear the Right-to-Lifers applauding and the Women's Right to Choosers groaning. But that's what it's like, all the way down the line. There's an excellent ten pages on the exact reasoning the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq - I had forgotten the nuances of the arguments, as one does, but very interesting it was. Mr Bumble was wrong, the law is not so much an ass, more a sleek horse which will obey any skilled rider. (is this cruel or just unusual?)