Hacker News Reader

Comment by v5v3 | Hacker News Reader

>Comparatively, how vulnerable is America to an executive gone wild compared to its peer countries?

In the USA, some judges are elected, hearings can be televised, fragmented laws nationwide, court filings often public.

In UK the opening of the judicial year happens in a church service (i.e. biblical punishment is common), many judges are freemasons,court filings not public, courts control what gets to media, the court below supreme court can, and routinely do, block cases from getting to supreme court. And More. In short UK judiciary is institutionally corrupt with the elected and unelected the one and the same but press won't say it.

View on HN

I feel your points are valid but don't really express enough detail. The supreme court in the UK though named the same doesn't really hold anywhere near as much power for the following reasons:

1) There is no written constitution, the supreme court in the UK is only there to interpret existing laws as written not to interpret differences between "tiers" of law

2) The UK has a system that can pass new laws, generally by simple majority so any decision rendered about existing law can be made obsolete generally fairly quickly (In contrast to the current intransigence of the current US system where it is hard to pass primary legislation and virtually impossible to modify the constitution)

3) the court was only established in 2009, and evidently we haven't done much to empower it

A better comparison country might be places like Canada or Australia who do have a written (and harder to modify) constitution.

The UK is all about 'appearencea' hence why they came up with 'justice must not just be done but be seen to be done'

With ref to your point 1 and 2 , they are not needed. HRA 1998 covers that.

Point 3 - the supreme court was previously within the House of Lords and the one day they got their own building.

The primary and secondary legislation, and leading case law is fine in the UK. Its just that the Judges know what are really there for and routinely falsify the outcomes.

No one sees the case files, no one sees the transcript, only the judges judgement is published and that we all have to pretend is never anything other than perfect...

>I feel your points are valid but don't really express enough detail.

I run a non profit trying to change this, can talk about it for hours. Volunteers welcome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com