The Inconvenience of a Just Legal System

The Chief Justice of Sri Lanka used to be Shirani Bandaranayake but she was impeached recently and removed from office. The International Bar Association’ s Human Rights Institute was going to send four lawyers from its Human Rights Institute to investigate the removal of the former Chief Justice, because there were concerns that the impeachment was irregular and motivated by political reasons rather than proper legal reasons.

A Simple Choice: whether to hold a Referendum on the EU

The United Kingdom is getting very excited about the possibility of a referendum to be held some time in the future on whether it should stay in the European Union or leave it. 

Freedom of Speech is Not the same as Freedom of the Press

We are now being bombarded with a campaign by the press, recently chastened by corruption and illegality. The campaign is for freedom of speech, but freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of the press. There is a small overlap. I shall explain.

Gaza: Peace Without Freedom Can Never Be Achieved

Sometimes in the West we close our eyes to events in the world. It seems that we can only take in one problem at any time. It was Iraq, then Afghanistan, then Libya, then Syria and now Palestine. Each time new atrocities and deaths occur we take in the news, intervene to make things worse, and then turn the page as our attention gets grabbed by another war or another disaster. In Palestine many people are in peril, and have been in peril for many years. They have suffered tremendously over many years and in the West we have ignored their suffering.

The Arithmetic of Life and Death,

The financial crisis that has had us all running scared for the future, has distracted our attention from more permanent concerns. The environment seems to be a fair economic weather problem, and wars have been regulated to the fourth division of concern. A week does not pass without us learning that one of our brave soldiers, or many of their brave opponents, has lost life in Afghanistan. We seem to have lost the plot in the drama of Afghanistan, rather as we lost in in the tragedy of Iraq. I do not know what we are fighting for. Perhaps there was never a plot in the first place.

Cry Your Tears For Freedom While you Count Your Money

The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan religious leader. A Buddhist, the Dalai Lama was one of the few religious leaders to be a ruler of a nation. He was enthroned on 1951 as the 14^th Dalai Lama of Tibet but a year later the communist Chinese toppled his government and China consumed the nation of Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled into exile where he has remained ever since, drawing attention to the oppression of Tibet. His exile has been longer that Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment or Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s house arrest.

We will do it because we can!

If in the 1960s a government had proposed that every person who wrote a letter had to, before posting it, file details of their name and address and provide details of the person to whom they sent the letters, and deposit a photostatic copy of the letter, which the government would not open without permission from a judge, the hippies and the establishment would have united to prevent such a plan. It would not matter how much the Home Secretary protested that the plan was to prevent the IRA blowing us all up and prevent organised criminals like the Krays from operating it would not have been enacted.

How to Repel an Attack on Freedom

Which is most important to us – freedom or safety? Freedom is always tested by danger and the limits of freedom, and its companion tolerance, are pushed back by vicious acts.

Freedom and Democracy

In the world today there is a movement towards freedom and in some parts of the Arab world some people are seeking to overthrow existing governments in order to secure what is sometimes described as freedom and at other times what is described as democracy. But freedom is not democracy and democracy does not always ensure freedom.

Waking up to War

I woke up yesterday to discover my country was at war. The newspapers said so. It had apparently declared war on a tyrant, because he was a tyrant and was tyrannising his own people, as tyrants do. He has been tyrannising his people for forty two years but now it seems war was appropriate. Last week it was appropriate for the Security Council of the United Nations to vote unanimously that the tyrant should be tried at the International Criminal Court at the Hague, notwithstanding that two of the members of the Security Council, China and the United States of America, refuse to accept its jurisdiction and do not recognise it as an international tribunal.