Taking the Law into Tribal Hands

A couple of years ago, I spent a month on a self-driving tour of Mexico. That country has a well-deserved reputation of being one of the most lawless nations on Earth. Mexico's murder rate, at around 25 per 100,000 of population per annum, is five times that of the United States and about thirty-five times that of New Zealand. There are entire regions of the country to which the warrant of the law does not extend or where the police are so corrupt they cannot be relied upon to enforce the law. When we were there, the Mexican president imposed federal police control over the state of Veracruz, sacking the entire state police force because it could not be trusted to uphold the rule of law, and since then the same has been done in Acapulco.

One of characteristics of a lawless Mexico is the prevalence of irregular enforcement of order (however those enforcing the "order" choose to define it). We got used to being stopped at unlawful roadblocks, often multiple times on a journey and on several occasions blockading entire cities. Many of these roadblocks were set up for the simple purpose of extorting money from hapless road users (particularly tourists like us - I think that rental cars in Mexico have special licence plates just to facilitate this). Others were established as protest actions in support of labour disputes or native land grievances. In most cases we weren't in any physical danger so long as we complied with their demands, but in one remote area of the country we were advised by Mexican Army patrols (the only legitimate authority in the area) not to stop for roadblocks under any circumstances if we could possibly avoid it. We were literally in fear for our lives.

I was reminded of my experiences in Mexico when I read about the "checkpoints" established by Maori tribal groups supposedly to stop the spread of Covid-19 to their areas. What makes these illegal roadblocks much worse is that they appear to have the support of local police and the New Zealand Government has refused to condemn them, which makes our country potentially as corrupt and as dangerous as Mexico. Of course, if I was to set up a roadblock at the end of my street, the police would be around to remove it and to arrest me as soon as you could say "rule of law".

We have seen the encroachment of special rights for Maori into New Zealand law for several decades, ever since Justice Cooke handed down his ruling in a 1987 Court of Appeal case relating to the sale of state-owned enterprises, which said that the Crown was obligated to act as if it were in a "partnership" with Maori tribes. This, of course, implied that Maori tribal authorities were equivalent to the Crown, with all the sovereign rights of an independent government. The problems with this are manifold, not the least being who defines what is a Maori tribal authority and whom do they represent? It is certainly not a recipe for universal, democratic, liberal government.

I have written before about how I believe legitimate political sovereignty derives solely from individual sovereignty, and therefore why I support the aspiration of any group of people for self-determination. If a distinct group in New Zealand, whether they are Maori or not, wish to establish a form of self-government, then that is their right. I also believe we all have an interest in ensuring all human beings enjoy the basic individual rights (of which the American Declaration of Independence remains the best definition with "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"), and as long as these rights are respected within the self-governing territory, then there is no reason for any external party to interfere with that self-government. What is intolerable is having two standards of law, or greater or lesser rights, based on ethnicity within the same jurisdiction. That is racism, pure and simple.

I will not submit to an illegal, racist, tribal authority that is trying to stop me going about my lawful business in this country. If I am confronted by an unlawful roadblock, I will act precisely as I was advised to do in that similarly lawless area of Mexico and I advise all law-abiding New Zealanders to do the same - keep your foot flat to the floor and keep going, no matter what.

[Hat-tips to Michael Coote at NZCPR and Bob Edlin at Point of Order.]

Arbitrary Justice in New Zealand

An article on the Fairfax Media website yesterday reported that the New Zealand Police had seized over a million dollars of assets from a gang leader that were allegedly the proceeds of crimes for which the Police had not been able to gain a conviction. This struck me as an example of how far our legal system had departed from the principles on which our law was founded.

The Police investigated and prosecuted a gang leader for money laundering, presumably (although the article does not specifically say) in relation to the proceeds of illegal drug sales. They failed to gain a conviction in two trials - the first ended in a hung jury, the second a not guilty verdict - and yet obtained a court order under the so-called Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act to seize the offender's assets. They justified this on the grounds that the gang leader could not produce evidence of a legitimate source of income to account for having the assets. The Police claim to have seized $390 million in assets since 2009 in similar cases.

This law is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it reverses the presumption of innocence, requiring the accused to prove his assets are not the proceeds of a criminal act. Secondly, it is double jeopardy - having been unable to prove their case against the accused, the Police get a second (or in this case, a third) bite of the apple in bringing criminal sanctions. Thirdly, it is a form of arbitrary justice in which the Police are hardly a neutral party in determining the penalty. These things are all contrary to the principles of natural justice and the rule of law that underlie our legal system and that derive from the English liberal traditions and hard-won constitutional protections dating back to the Magna Carta.

I don't have any personal sympathy for the gang leader in question, who belongs to the notoriously violent Mongrel Mob, but I believe we should judge all laws by the standard of whether they adhere to principles by which we ourselves would want to be judged. There is a very good reason why civilised societies have held to the principles of natural justice and the rule of law and in their absence we would be entirely at the mercy of the whims of politicians, bureaucrats, and their armed enforcers in the Police.

Those who support such powers should ask themselves if they would be able to prove that all their assets came from legitimate sources if the onus was on them to do so.

FIFA, Silk Road and American "Justice"

This week in the news we have seen two criminal cases that are not entirely unrelated - the sentencing of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and the arrest of FIFA officials in Switzerland.

Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. What did he do that the US justice system determined was so irredeemable, you might ask? Did he commit mass murder? No, he ran a website that was used by people all over the world for the buying and selling of recreational narcotics. Ulbricht appears to have been motivated not so much by financial gain (although there is nothing wrong with that) as philosophy. He was a libertarian and believes, as I do, that governments have no business interfering in the voluntary interactions of rational, adult human beings. As this article on libertarian website Reason.com explains, Ulbricht believes people should have the right to choose whether or not they take recreational drugs and governments should not initiate violence against those who do so (or those like him who enable them to do so).

The United States Government has devoted a large part of its resources over the last few decades to pursuing and imprisoning people who consume and trade in recreational narcotics. As a result America has the highest level of imprisonment of any Western nation (with 4.4% of the world's population, the US has 22% of the world's prisoners - and more than half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offences). The very high imprisonment rate is due to three factors. Firstly the American justice system is overwhelmingly weighted in favour of prosecutors with federal prosecutors having a 93% conviction rate [2012 figures], which is matched only in countries that tend not to have much respect for the rule of law such as China. Secondly, the prosecutorial system in the United States is based on a fundamentally corrupt practice that is outlawed in many other countries - that of plea bargaining. This practice encourages prosecutors to lay manifestly excessive charges against defendants so that they will be forced to plead guilty to lesser charges, even when those lesser charges are themselves tenuous. Thirdly, the US has manifestly excessive sentences, especially for drug offences - for a first offence conviction for trafficking in just one gram of LSD the federal mandatory sentence is 5 - 40 years in prison [source: DEA website].

In Ross Ulbricht's case the inherent excess and corruption of the US justice system is made even worse by what Forbes magazine describes as "staggering corruption in the Silk Road investigation." The article reveals that two of the investigators in the case have been charged with embezzlement and theft and that "a state's witness took the fall for an agent's theft, thus becoming a target for murder-for-hire" (for which it was implied that Ross Ulbricht was responsible even though he was not tried for this). Evidence of this incredible corruption was suppressed by the prosecution until immediately prior to the trial and the judge denied all attempts by the defence to introduce it during the trial. Read the article linked above for yourself and I'm sure you will be as gobsmacked as me as to how someone can be sentenced to life in prison on the back of such impropriety by the US authorities.

With all this in mind, what should we make of the arrest of FIFA officials in Switizerland on extradiction warrants from the US Government? I think there is no doubt that FIFA is a very corrupt organisation and has been for many decades. The officials concerned, and long-term FIFA president Sepp Blatter as well, should held accountable for their corrupt practices. But I think Russian president Vladimir Putin (who is something of an expert on corruption himself) has it right when he says the arrests were “another blatant attempt by the United States to extend its jurisdiction to other states.” The sight of US Justice Department officials posing for photos as they left FIFA's regional association offices in Miami with boxes of papers had more than an hint of sham about it, and newly-appointed US Attorney-General Loretta Lynch's press conference did not add to the credibility of the case (and doesn't she know it isn't called "soccer" in the rest of the world?).

I have written before about the imperialistic ambitions of the United States to extend its legal bailiwick to the whole world. This wouldn't be so bad if the United States lived up to the intent of its founding document as a nation of people with "unalienable Rights...[including] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", whose government derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed." But America is no longer that, if it ever was. The US has deviated so far from its founders' original intent of a limited republic, where the government serves at the pleasure of its people rather than the other way around, that it is hypocritical in the extreme for it to try and impose its legislative morality on the rest of the world.

Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying America is irredeemably corrupt or has lost all respect for the rule of law, and I'd still far sooner be tried in an American court than a Chinese one - but a state that locks up a man for the rest of his life for the offence of running a website is a cruel and capricious one. And the world doesn't need a cruel and capricious imperial policeman.