Preserving mystery in legislation
“The reason we haven’t defined hate crime in our bill banning hate crime is that then people would know what the crime is.” They’re going with that?
[Ireland’s Minister for Justice Helen] McEntee also defended the proposed hate crime and hate speech bill, and said she believes the majority of people want to see it enacted.
…
“Firstly, when it comes to the hate speech and the hate crime legislation, the reason that we haven’t defined hate is by defining hate and using another word, you then have to try and describe essentially what that means. And you’re potentially leaving a gap where certain prosecutions might fall or where it may be more difficult to have prosecutions under this legislation.”
It takes the breath away.
I’m hoping that, if this law is passed, Irish courts recognize a principle equivalent to the U.S. doctrine that a statute can be unconstitutionally vague or overbroad.
Basically, they’re reserving the right to define hate as whatever they want at the moment. This leaves a lot of room for politically motivated prosecutions, or prosecutions of things someone just doesn’t like. (That is, of course, the intent. Misgendering anyone?)
Perhaps they’ve inadvertently given away the game. If people knew what they meant by hate speech, people would see parts of it and say WTF? People would know the total vacuity of the ideas behind the law.
Do these idiots not realise over-broad legislation that criminalises anything and everything disliked is a bad thing, even for them? All it takes is a change of government to whoever it is they oppose, and suddenly that catch-all statute will be turned on them.
Sheesh! She thinks it a bad thing that prosecutions sometimes fail and she dare to call herself Minister for Justice.
I’ve lived a sort of double life as part scientist and part engineer, so I like to come at these things from two directions. On the one hand we have the big-picture thinking described well by iknklast and Holmes: this is a terrible idea for freedom and democracy. It will be used to serve political goals, that’s inevitable. Over in the UK, we’ve installed Police and Crime Commissioners as political appointments; these are the people who would be in charge of how hate laws are implemented in practice, which makes me more than a little uneasy. The entire principle of policing in the UK is that police are supposed to be civilians, not soldiers or agents of the government.
But the engineer in me sees it from the practical angle too. The phrase that keeps occurring to me is “if all else fails, we can always get him for hate crime.”
Police hate protests because they’re difficult and expensive to manage. They’re always looking for excuses to prevent them or to ban them outright. In the UK we’ve just passed an extremely dangerous law giving police authority to arrest people in the general area of a protest without probable cause. It was used on day one to do just that. It’s roughly the equivalent of arresting someone with a paperclip of “going equipped to commit a crime” because they might conceivably pick a lock with it.
If they had hate crime laws to back them up, I have no doubt at all that UK police would use them to put as much of an end to protests as they could; not for political reasons, but purely because of cost.
There is absolutely no upside to this law that I can see and I hate to think of it serving as a model in other jurisdictions.
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