Now here's something you don't see every day, at least in the supposedly civilized West. The Ontario cabinet secretly changed the law just before the G20 summit, to give the police wider powers to arrest people. There's a story here.
At Queen’s Park, NDP justice critic and lawyer Peter Kormos said: “This law was not only passed in secret, it was kept secret.
“This is the stuff Kafka wrote novels about. Secret laws that the citizenry is not aware of are the hallmarks of tin pot dictatorships.”
The measure, carrying a penalty of up to two months in jail or a $500 fine upon conviction, was revealed after a 31-year-old York University master’s student refused to show identification near the fence and was arrested based on a regulation few knew existed. He was held for five hours in a pen at a temporary holding centre on Eastern Ave.
Later, the CBC reported that there actually wasn't a secret law requiring people to show ID near a police fence, but there was a secret law nonetheless:
Premier Dalton McGuinty still hasn't explained why cabinet passed the regulation change in secret, and then kept it secret.
Even though it wasn't accurate, the public was left to believe the province had given officers the power to demand identification and detain anyone within five metres of the G20 site.
All weekend there were reports of police stopping people throughout downtown Toronto — often in areas nowhere near the G20 zone — demanding identification and to search bags and backpacks.
Seriously. A country that calls itself a democracy passes laws in secret to give the police additional powers. I rather liked what councillor Howard Moscoe said:
“These are police state regulations — we fought wars to protect freedoms like these,” thundered Councillor Howard Moscoe.
Amusingly, we've done similar things in Finland, only more like a police state. Before the infamous Smash ASEM protests in Helsinki in 2006, police participating in suppressing the protests had been explicitly told by their superiors that normal laws on detaining people would not apply today, and they should detain anyone they think is suspicious and hold them overnight.
Let me repeat myself: they had been told that the law doesn't apply. And they went with that.
Of course, when things were sussed out later their superiors obviously denied having ever said that. Nonetheless, the Finnish parliament's ombudsman, who's in charge of investigating these things, found the police had acted directly against the law several times in suppressing the protests. Of course, because this is Finland, none of that matters: a couple of officers were given a meaningless reprimand for directly violating the laws they're supposed to be upholding, and policemen who ordered others to break the law got nothing at all.
So really, while Canada passes secret laws and doesn't tell people about it, Finland doesn't even bother. For another proud example of the Finnish police and the rule of law, see here.
Civil liberties, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment