Draw Breath

There are two interesting articles in today's Times, suggesting at major extensions of domestic law in response to globalisation. The first reports on the US Supreme Court's decision (though in odd circumstances) to allow a lawsuit to go ahead, under the Alien Tort Claims Act (see also here), of companies that collaborated with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. If lawyers establish that these companies knowingly assisted the South African regime in breaching human rights, they may be liable for millions of dollars.

Second, there's an article on the implications of corporations being found responsible for bribery in both developing and developed countries. It's always one of those things denied by the sorts of twats who advocate cutting aid to developing countries because of corruption: corrupters are just as guilty and they tend to be a lot closer to home. Certainly, the BAE probe was depressing, but corruption is very much coming onto the agenda. Again, the Alien Tort Claims Act may be start to be employed in interesting ways here. In which case, private action will emerge as one of the major sources of regulation of globalisation.

I recall being in South Africa a few years ago and seeing the minister for justice rejecting a national High Court ruling on the SA government's bonkers HIV policy on the grounds that, because the court was in Pretoria, it had no jurisdiction beyond the Guateng province. It was a depressing moment, combining a disgraceful political stance with a sneering dismissal of the role of courts in maintaining the principle that society ought to be ruled by laws not people.

Beverly Cooper-Flynn's re-admission into Fíanna Fáil last week, based on a unanimous decision of the Parliamentary Party, was just as dispiriting.

I'm in the middle of an enormous teaching burst here which, despite the fears expressed in my previous post, is most enjoyable indeed. For me at least...

Anyway, that coupled with a temporary lack of broadband at home has meant that a number of interesting issues have slipped by.

Primary among them was Justice Carney's speech (also here) referring (obliquely in the end apparently) to Majella Holohan's Victim Impact Statement at the end of Wayne O'Donoghue's trial. Chris Gaskin has an nuanced general piece about Victim Impact Statements over on Balrog and there's a characteristically intelligent discussion about the matter on GUBU.

I have to say that this sort of problem brings the arch-formalist out in me. While we all ought to feel enormous sympathy for the victims of crimes (clearly including the family of victims) that does not mean that courts are an appropriate venue for catharsis, even if after a trial.

The state may be under an obligation to devote significant resources to assisting victims, but - to be rather blunt - victims do not own crimes. To imagine otherwise, even to the limited degree that a VIS does, is I think wrongheaded. It legitimises the idea that criminal justice is a matter of retribution and that victims' impressions ought to drive the state's response to crime. Compassion can be the business of the state, but it's certainly not the business of the court.