UK Govt Changes Law To Prevent Pope's Arrest

England has always been a leader in human rights and the rule of law. Now they've thought of something new: Put a politician in the courtroom!

Children in the UK and particularly Ireland, which is heavily Catholic, have been hard hit by the pedophile priests who lurked in the Roman Catholic Church, and then were protected from prosecution by church seniors including Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now the Pope. There is some strong evidence that Ratzinger was directly complicit in shielding priests from prosecution, and worse, for allowing them to move from parish to parish, abusing more and more children. It's likely that Ratzinger is personally responsible for a number of children's nightmare sexual abuse at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest that Ratzinger protected.

Now, quite reasonably, some Brits want Ratzinger to answer for his deeds. The UK apparently has a law that allows a private prosecutor to take up a case when the public prosecutor can't or won't. A private prosecutor can provide evidence to a judge and, if the evidence is strong enough, have the alleged criminal arrested.

Well, no more. The UK government is in the process of changing the law:

"Justice Secretary Ken Clarke proposed changes to the law today which would require the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions to any arrest warrant issued under universal jurisdiction."

In other words, instead of the rule of evidence and law, the UK now injects politics into criminal prosecutions.

I guess we've tossed out the idea that an independent judge, one who isn't swayed by voters and public opinion, is the best person to make fair, unbiased decisions. It seems that we've now decided that fairness to victims, and fairness to the alleged criminals, isn't really in our best interest. Instead, what we really want is to have politicians overruling our judges and overruling our prosecutors.

Yeah, that's the ticket. Politicians in our courts, interfering with judges decisions. Why didn't we think of that sooner?

England has always been at the forefront of democracy. They were the leaders when it came to modern governance, human rights, and jury trials. And now, they're taking the lead again by injecting politicians into the judicial process. We are awestruck by their leadership.