Bloody Lawyers

Then and now

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Olympic lunacy, Policing, UK politics
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Then:

A lawful Salvation Army march attracted disorderly opposition and was therefore the occasion of a breach of the peace.
Held: It could not be found a case of unlawful assembly against the leaders of the Salvation Army. Accepting that a person is liable for the natural consequences of what he does, the court nevertheless held that the natural consequences of the lawful activity of the Salvation Army did not include the unlawful activities of others, even if the accused knew that others would react unlawfully.

Now:

In what appeared to be pre-emptive strikes against anything considered to have the potential to be “trouble”, around 100 people were arrested in advance of the Royal Wedding held on 29th April 2011.

At para. 152 the judgment states – “…. we find nothing in the various strands of the claimants’ case, whether taken individually or cumulatively, to make good the contention that the policing of the Royal Wedding involved an unlawful policy or practice, with an impermissibly low threshold of tolerance for public protest.”

Also:

It was around then that the graffiti artists realised what point the police were trying to make with them. Having been arrested, they were questioned about what they considered petty matters – accusations of criminal damage in the ’90s, questions about websites and magazines that they were involved in. After being briefly questioned about these seemingly irrelevant matters, they were told that they were to be bailed until November on the condition that they did not use any form of railway in London (overground, tube or tram), carry spray paint (or other graffiti tools, presumably) at any time, or travel within a mile of any Olympic area. That includes the Olympic Park, the ExCel center and other Earls Court locations, Greenwich park, Hampton Court Palace, Hyde Park, Lord’s Cricket Ground, North Greenwich Arena, The Mall, The Royal Artillery Barracks, Wembley Arena, Wembley Stadium, Wimbledon and a host of out-of-London locations.

Enjoy the games.

What the Twitter Joke Trial means for all of us

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust
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Jack of Kent on why the Twitter Joke Trial matters:

The Paul Chambers case – known as the “Twitter Joke Trial” – has three points of significance:

– how relentless administrative and judicial stupidity can end in a conviction;

– how the CPS are wrongly using criminal law in respect of electronic communications; and

– how a criminal record can change a person’s life for the worse.

Let us hope Doncaster Crown Court can reverse this injustice on Friday and allow Paul to rebuild his life.

He explains succinctly why and how these points matter for Paul Chambers, the poor guy whose life was ruined through this case, but it has of course broader considerations too, especially the first point. Chambers was originally convicted through a long chain of people and institutions unable or unwilling to apply common sense about what was essentially the kind of stupid joke you’d make to your mates or cow-orkers, but on twitter. You could’ve had the same sort of case thirty-forty years ago as well, if some passing police officer had taken offense to a similar joke by some local wit. But whereas then you had to have had spectacularly bad luck to say something stupid in front of a copper himself dumb enough to take an obvious joke seriously, if you do the same on the internet, your bad joke can land you in hot water long after you’ve made and forgotten it.

Twitter is meant for ephemeral conversation, but they don’t disappear when you stop talking. Once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, barring acts of god or Google. Which means that many more people can read and misinterpret your comments than just your mates and it only takes one blockhead to ruin your day. What’s more, because it’s so easy to gather data online, you have whole classes of professional blockheads, in government as well as working for private companies looking for “threats” and it’s not in their interest or power to treat anything like a joke. As with airport police, these people have no sense of humour and are obliged to treat any bomb joke like a real threat, no matter how stupid.

This is not to blame Paul Chambers for his misfortune, rather the fault lies with institutions like the police, like the Crown Prosecution Service and like the Robin Hood Airport security department for not using common sense or rather having institutionalised processes in which the right thing to do is to not think for yourself but follow procedures. That’s always been a bad thing, but it’s made worse when such a dumb organisation is fed the huge amounts of data gathered on us routinely every day and starts to datamine. No government and damn few private companies truly understand information technology and the simple fact that it’s not how much but what kind and which quality of data you gather and how you use it that’s important. So you get things like airport security officers googling for their airport to detect threats and then using inflexible, dumb procedures to process these “threats” because the only thing their organisations understands is “more data good”, “common sense bad”.

That’s the spectre we’re all living with, of huge unaccountable organisations fucking over our lives not out of malice, but out of wilful stupidity because of something we said online.

Urgent appeal: 24 Hours to Save Refugee and Migrant Justice

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, UK politics
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Please help save the indispensible Refugee and Migrant Justice:

A consortium of charitable trusts and city law firms, supported by Simon Hughes MP, are putting together a proposal to Government to save Refugee and Migrant Justice (RMJ). The proposal asks the Government to at least pay the money that it would have to pay anyway on insolvency on the understanding that this will be matched with up to £1,000,000 by way of grants, secured loans and donations to meet cash needs to finance work in progress.

We need concrete commitments for these funds today or as early as possible tomorrow – actual cash can come a bit later. So far today, we have been pledged £193, 625. Significantly more could follow from charitable trusts and others we are already talking with. But at this point it is clear that this is going to be a very considerable challenge without some additional help.

The aim of the plan is to enable, with full transparency and without prejudicing the position of creditors, a 3 month period in which the Government can consider whether it might change the payment system, there might be time to look at some innovative solutions with the Office of Civil Society and banks and RMJ would demonstrate that it had a viable forward business model. If all that fails, at least it would provide time for an orderly transfer of our clients’ cases. We have 10,000 clients, including 900 unaccompanied children who may otherwise be left in limbo.

We are appealing for donations, however small, to help save RMJ and secure its services over the next three months. If funds from both Government and other funders can be agreed, RMJ’s administrators would, in principle, support the proposal to take RMJ out of administration.

To make a pledge, or for further information, please telephone Kathleen Commons on 07872 161 271 or email savermj@gmail.com

Refugee and Migrant Justice is one of the few organisations on the side of socalled illegal migrants or “bogus asylum seekers”, helping to defend some of the most vulnerable people in Great Britain. If it should disappear through lack of funds it would be a disaster.

First Muslim women elected to British parliament

Anti-war, Bloody Lawyers, Feminism, Socialism, UK elections, UK politics, Women
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Via TwoCircles.net:

London : Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi have become the first Muslim women to be elected to the British parliament after successfully defending Labour seats.

Mahmood successfully increased the majority of former International Development Secretary Clare Short, who has retired from parliament, from under 7,000 votes to more than 10,000 in Birmingham Ladywood in central England.

The Oxford University-educated barrister saw off challenges from two other Muslim candidate, Ayoub Khan representing the Liberal Democrats and Nusrat Ghani, who was standing for the Tories.

I see some things never change.

The announcement of her success came as Qureshi, who is also a lawyer, won by a reduced majority of more than 8,600 in the Bolton South East constituency in north-west England.

Not another bloody lawyer – like they didn’t cause enough damage already.

Respect Party leader Salma Yaqoob is seen as having an outside chance of capturing Birmingham Hall Green, which has boundary changes with the adjacent Sparkbrook and Small Heath, where she came second at the last elections with 27.5% of the vote.

Salma Yaqoob didn’t win but came second:

Despite being written off by the media I came second, polling over 12,000 votes. It is a fantastic achievement and testimony to a desire for a political alternative to the parties of bombing and big business. It is clear that many people’s fear of a Tory government boosted the Labour vote, puncturing the Lib Dem bubble but also squeezing my vote as well.

Not a win, but a good result nonetheless. And if any proposed LibDem/A.N.Other coalition falls apart, she can stand again.

Some Days All You Want To Do Is Cry

Blinded by Science, Bloody Lawyers, Crime, Natural World
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Vent Fauna

Hydrothermal vents have been compared to oases. That’s a good description. Oases are lush areas in a desert based on a water source. In a similar way, a vent is an oasis: it is teeming with life in the middle of the nearly barren ocean floor. A vent spewing microbe- and mineral-rich, super hot water is this oasis’ water source.

Vent communities are an ecotone. They are a transition zone between the hot water emerging from the vent and the cold environment of surrounding sea water. Just 15 centimeters (6 in.) laterally away from the vent, the seawater is cold, yet the heat and chemicals rising from it can be measured with powerful thermometers for many miles.

The life forms we see are truly bizarre, and some are very ancient. The vents probably predate life on earth. Scientists believe vents have been around for 3.5 – 4 billion years, and life in them probably began soon thereafter. We saw vents for the first time fewer than 25 years ago, in 1977.

I first came across the issue of seabed mining rights when studying maritime law in the early nineties and I thought then that the lack of international legal safeguards against exploitation meant that here was a disaster waiting to happen.

Well, that disaster’s here:

Nautilus Minerals, a small Canadian company backed by the giant mining company Anglo-American, has just received an environmental permit from the government of Papua New Guinea to conduct the world’s first deep-sea mining in the vent fields of the Bismarck Sea.

Giant undersea excavators will be built this year, and ore could be rising from depths of 1,600m by 2012.

Conservation biologist Professor Rick Steiner, formerly of the University of Alaska, was called in to examine the company’s original environmental impact assessment study.

He is concerned about the dumping of thousands of tonnes of rock on the seabed and about the danger of spillages of toxic residue, but his real objection is more fundamental.

He explained: “The site that they mine, they’re going to destroy all these vent chimneys where the sulphide fluids come out.”
The HyBIS submarine captured images of the vents on camera

He added that it could cause the extinction of species that are not even known to science yet.

“I think that, from an ethical stand-point, is unacceptable,” he said.

Steven Rogers, CEO of Nautilus, said that he accepted that the mined area would be damaged, but said he was convinced that it could recover.

He believes deep-sea mining will be less damaging to the environment than mining on land.

He said: “I think there’s a much greater moral question…. here we have an opportunity to provide those metals with a much, much lower impact on the environment.”

The success of the Nautilus enterprise is dependent less on questions of morality than of profit.

Steven Rogers estimates that this first mining site could yield anything from tens of millions of dollars up to $300m in value.

But Professor Steiner believes that success in the Bismarck Sea will provoke a “goldrush” at vent systems around the world, most of which have yet to be properly studied.

Vent systems are fundamental to life on this planet, each one a fully functioning ecosystem that supports the web of life on the planet in ways we are only just beginning to understand.

“….deep-sea mining will be less damaging to the environment than mining on land.” says Steven Rogers; what he actually means is “If I can’t actually see the damage, it isn’t actually happening”.

What the hell are New Guinea thinking, letting these profiteers destroy the vent fields?

And that’s only within their territorial waters. There’s nothing to stop similar profiteers doing the same in the open ocean. No governmental permission is required. How long before the profiteers destroy the mid-Atlantic Ridge vent fields and their associated fauna and flora?

Not very long – plans are already in hand. Pass me a hanky, please.