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Comment by mgamache | Hacker News Reader

The EU is so protective of consumer rights, but not of personal rights with respect to governments. Seems odd, but is a result of socialist influence. In the US we have more protection against government abuse and less corporate. But it ends up being the worst of all worlds because the government just uses the corporations to provide the data they could/would never have access to.

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This is France, not EU.

Like it has done many times the EU court ECHR will say this French law is not compatible with human rights and send things back to french courts.

Same thing it has done to laws forcing keeping logs for everyone forever:

https://www.nextinpact.com/article/44019/conservation-donnee...

But then the french highest state court judged that it doesn't have to follow what the EU court said:

https://www.nextinpact.com/article/45613/comment-conseil-det...

Then it will be appealled again with same results...

The ECHR is not an EU institution, perhaps you have the ECJ in mind?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Human_Rights

From your own link: "The European Court of Human Rights is an international court of the Council of Europe"

The Council of Europe* predates the European Union by half a century (depending on which origin you choose -- the European Union in its current form was established in 1993). It is much narrower in scope and has much wider membership than the EU. Even Russia was a member of the Council of Europe until the Ukraine war, when they were expelled. The UK also is still a member (a founding member, at that) even though they left the EU.

The only relation between the ECHR and the EU is that EU nations are required to join the Council of Europe as part of the accession process, and the EU can bind a member nation to adhere to rulings of the ECHR. Outside the European Union, the ECHR can render judgements but cannot enforce them.

*Not to be confused with the European Council, which is one of the strategic bodies of the EU. Don't ask...

The US has uniquely good protections against abuse by government officials. Things like the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, explicitly designed to keep prosecutors from overstepping their boundaries, simply don't exist in most of the world. Admissibility is complex and important in the US and basically not a concern outside the US at all, virtually everything is admissible in court. For example, it has been established at the highest level of jurisprudence in the EU that you can torture suspects and you can prosecute them with evidence acquired through their forced confession. That's because at a fundamental level, the prosecutors/court determining the truth far outweighs the right to a fair trial in most of the world. The idea outside the US being that you'll just prosecute investigators and prosecutors who overstep legal boundaries.

Does it really, in practice? Looking at the two systems, I would genuinely trust the US system less.

Also, you are wrong about admissibility. It is not true that everything is allowed, it depends on context. Also, what happens even when the thing is admitted is that police can be punished for breaking rules. Not by changing result of the court, but by punishing the police. And that is super big one.

Plus, most case in US are not even going through court. 96% or so are done by guilty plea. Going through court is super expensive and you risk much higher punishment.

US courts are notoriously deferential to cops and prodecutors. It just does not strikes me a system to trust all that much.

> has been established at the highest level of jurisprudence in the EU that you can torture suspects and you can prosecute them with evidence acquired through their forced confession.

This sounds like complete tosh - what is the highest level of. EU, ECHR? I dont believe they ever made such a ruling

Additionally, there was no EU equivalent to Guantanamo Bay level of toture and extrajudicial kidnapping.

I was thinking about ECHR application number 22978/05, but the case turns out to be significantly more subtle. The ECHR ruled the opposite of what I claimed in principle - so evidence gathered through a forced confession is generally inadmissible as an exceptional rule, however, in the specific case the admission of the evidence wasn't seen as rendering the trial unfair, specifically because he confessed in the trial and the admitted evidence was then used to confirm the confession. The ECHR argues the confession-at-trial "broke" the otherwise straight chain of forced confession => evidence => conviction, even though that confession was arguably predicated on the inadmissible (per ECHR) evidence admitted by the original criminal court. 6/17 judges dissented with this part of the ruling.

I suspect the ECHR tried to do two things at once here:

1. establish a rule that torturing people does result in all resulting evidence to be excluded from trial, and if that leaves authorities with no evidence, then there can be no trial. Reading the ruling it clearly ECHR considers the "just prosecute the prosecutors" approach insufficient when article 3 (torture) is concerned - you can't have a trial based on torture and call it fair, basically.

2. not letting Gaefgen get off because there is no doubt at all that he murdered the child.

doi 10.1017/S2071832200020290 is of interest for this.

> Additionally, there was no EU equivalent to Guantanamo Bay level of toture and extrajudicial kidnapping.

Why do you think Gitmo is in Cuba and not actual US territory?

> The US has uniquely good protections against abuse by government officials.

I hear even civil forfeiture is in decline.

Though too many cases still end by plea bargain. Which has interesting parallels to torture https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... from 1978. With others arguing that plea bargain is coerced confession, and some legal scholars even thinking thoughtful torture would be better https://www.econlib.org/how-thoughtful-torture-beats-plea-ba...

I love the US, and part of that love is to help it see its weaknesses and injustices so we can fix them.

> Seems odd, but is a result of socialist influence

What compels americans to make these idiotic claims?

The Red scare left a lasting cultural imprint. Ask any socalist what they think socialism is and compare it to what an American[1] thinks socialism is. Note the differences.

1. obvsly a non-socialist American

Also, Glenn Beck had a lot to do with it. He gave a bizarre version of 20c history that stuck, to a lot of angry people who don't read. It used to be that right-wingers would target the New Deal as socialism, now they think the banks and consumer rights are socialism.

If you can convince people the banks are socialist, you've created a Schrödinger's Premise where the banks primarily exist to destroy the banks; any premise that is both true and not true at the same time can be used to prove anything.

What compels non-Americans to deny the obvious truth? I guess they are just idiots who don't study history. You need to read some more. The way Socialist ideas played out in the American and European context are widely different. For Europe socialist ideas more directly influenced government policies and parties. In the US the effect was most directly seen in the labor union movement. Many people credit the labor unions as a reason there was no large communist party in the US. Saying Socialist ideas had/have greater influence in Europe is just obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communists_in_the_United_State...

This is a classic result of socialism. See Hayek: "centralized planning, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom

Isn't it ironic that serfs were private property but socialism stands accused.

Whenever capitalism does anything wrong, it's socialism's fault.

France is not a socialist country.

There always has to be a balance.

Some countries have enacted laws to create an obligation to disclose encryption keys, etc. during criminal investigations in response to new technologies because now everyone has access to encryption methods that are essentially unbreakable without knowing the key. So while people have and should have the right not to incriminate themselves it is also reasonable to ensure that criminal investigations can still be (fairly) carried out... It was much easier when people could only hide their secrets in a safe.

I believe even in the US one may be obligated to disclose keys.

One big question is whether this should require a court order, which implies that the police must convince a judge that this is necessary and useful, or whether (as seems the case here?) the police themselves have that power, which is indeed more contentious.

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