'I've got a luverly bunch a' cocklecarrots ...'

"'Ere they are a-sitting in a row".  In Strasbourg, actually!

For the benefit of my foreign readers I am paraphrasing an old cockney song based on the cries of street vendors selling coconuts.  Also, I am pinching a ludicrous character, Justice Cocklecarrot, from a famous British satirist.  Anyway, the 'Cocklecarrots' I have in mind today are the buffoons, quite beyond satire, who sit on the European Court of Human Rights. Yesterday they halted the extradition of the terrorist, Abu Hamza, to the United States on the grounds that, according to David Blackburn of The Coffee House:

[He] would likely be subject to inhumane and degrading incarceration. In other words, the ECHR has decided that the US prison system is not compatible with the standards agreed by signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights.

To be fair, they may be right. I have no idea what life is like inside American prisons, some good, some bad, just like ours is my guess, but if he is guilty of what it is they want him for, terrorism, then I hope he gets the worst.  However, there is a more important point which Blackburn illustrates in his article.  The very same ECHR allowed the extradition of Garry McKinnon, the alleged hacker into American defence computers.  (As an aside, I have watched with some amused scepticism the carefully orchestrated campaign in support of McKinnon who, it is alleged, is suffering from Aspergers syndrome - whatever that is when it's at home - and which seeks to pursuade us that he is perfectly harmless, just 'a very, very naughty boy' - yeah, right!)  Anyway, as Blackburn points out, if American prisons are such hell, why has the ECHR allowed McKinnon's extradition but halted Abu Hamza's?

I'm away overnight, back tomorrow.

Comments

[dearieme]

"I have no idea what life is like inside American prisons": neither have I, but I'm struck by the number of Yanks who celebrate on the web the prevalence of homosexual rape in their prisons.

My own prison policy is to keep the bastards short of food and exercise, and remote from the first hint of luxury, but protect them from murder, rape and disease.

[dearieme]

By the by, one answer to your question might be that there is a very low likelihood of the Yanks torturing the hacker, but a high likelihood (in the view of the court) of their torturing the terrorist twat.

[David Duff]

Yes, I like your prison policy, 'DM', but I would make extra food available in return for good behaviour. Oh, and prison visits limited to once a year and then only through a glass partition - that should cut the drug supplies down to a minimum.

As for torture, I have yet to read of any example of it inflicted on terrorist suspects even in 'Gitmo'. 'Water-boarding'? Special forces actually volunteer for it as part of their training.

[hank]

David

Way back when I was brigade duty officer one of my tasks was to inventory the prisoners in the Mannheim Military Jail.

(Walk unarmed into a bay of up to 20 bunks of “sleeping” prisoners and count them, make sure it is a person not pillows under the blankets without touching. The MP who is holding the door a half inch open has instructions to close if there is a problem. I suppose 2d Lieutenants are the most expendable soldiers in the British army also)

A bleak place clean and functional, but a jail. People whom I know who had occasion to visit GI’s in the German prisons said it was a resort compared to the German jails, like something out of 19th century gothic novel. I suspect that the European Court of Human Rights could do some house cleaning closer to home.

But I doubt it. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/5760 The Gäfgen Torture Complaint and the European Court of Human Rights. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for defendant in this case but shouldn’t the rules apply to all?

[David Duff]

Thanks for the link, Hank, I'm 'under orders from she who must be obeyed this morning but I'll get around to reading it later.