This is how tyranny is maintained.
Just like the five supreme court justices in their ruling on Obama-care, they are now all officially on board with the ”living and breathing” constitution meme.
H/T: Fjordman
We make up the law as we go along, admits Britain’s new Euro-judge
Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph via The Iconoclast
Think of some of the more bizarre interpretations that have come out of the European Court of Human Rights. How does the ‘right to a family life’ allow illegal immigrants to defy deportation orders? How did ‘freedom of expression’ come to encompass pornography in prison cells? How does the prohibition of torture mean that a state can’t repatriate dangerous militants to places where they won’t be tortured, but someone else might have been?
Whatever the rights and wrongs of such rulings, they are plainly political rather than legal. You can make a case that, for example, felons should not lose the right to vote. But if that is your view, you should stand for election and seek to alter the legislation. The objection to the ECHR is not that all its judgments are idiotic – though some of them are – but that it is behaving as a legislative rather than a judicial body, ruling on the basis of what it thinks the law ought to say rather than what it says.
One of the reasons it does so is that it isn’t staffed by judges – not, at least, as we understand the term. Like its cousin, the European Court of Justice, it doesn’t require its members to have served on the bench in their home countries. Many of them are academics, politicians and human rights activists who happen to have law degrees. And some are quite blatant about using the institution to advance an agenda that would be rejected at the ballot box.
Consider Britain’s new representative, Paul Mahoney. James Slack describes him as ‘A Eurocrat who has never been a judge in Britain’: for 30 years, he has worked within the Strasbourg system.
