What happens when the authorities neglect their duty
We have rampant paedophobia in Britain – thanks to endemic paedophilia. We deserve to have neither.
A Facebook page set up to monitor paedophiles has been removed after a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that it risked infringing the human rights of a convicted sex offender. The man, who cannot be identified, started legal proceedings against the social networking site after discovering his photograph and threatening comments had been posted on the page.
I can imagine there will be rising blood-pressure in Guildford about this one, but in this case High Court judge Bernard McCloskey did the right thing. The convicted sex offender had previously been given a six-year jail sentence for a string of child sex offences committed more than 20 years ago. As McCloskey rightly pointed out, “Society has dealt with the plaintiff in accordance with the rule of law. He has been punished by incarceration, and he is subject to substantial daily restrictions on his lifestyle.”
The site has been taken down, although I understand a new one replaced it within hours.
Before too long, this kind of Kangaroo Court harassment can reach the stage where Sun readers are chucking bricks through the windows of paediatricians. But rather than just roll our eyes at such behaviour, we should also put the obvious non-legal argument based on the wider context: if idiots in both major Parties (along with corrupt police officers and oddly lenient judges) are doing little beyond looking the other way or covering things up in relation to paedophile activities, what are concerned parents supposed to do – wait until one of their kids is kidnapped?
Unfortunately, there’s more. Having got a taste for shutting parents up, Chummy has decided to take things further. Having won this landmark case against Facebook users, he is now seeking damages from the social networking giant. More work for the lawyers kerr-ching, and more rising blood pressure in Guildford. But everyone from the cartoon retired colonel to the ordinary Mum is going to need medication when they see the remaining facts that were not available during the original McCloskey judgement. Mr Paedophile is a long way from being cured, it seems.
He first offended in 1980, when he was still a juvenile. All of the offences for which he was jailed were committed between 1982 and 1989. He was released after serving half of a six year prison sentence, only to be detained for a further six months for breaching a condition of his licence. He then admitted six further charges in 2005.
So: here we have a bloke who is indeed restricted, but carries on offending; and who was indeed being wrongly harassed, but has developed a taste for litigation to which he has little or no right.
We can argue uphill and downdale about Human Rights and greedy lawyers and what about the victims. But the simple reality is that if the authorities showed more dedication and less corruption in the prosecution of these appalling crimes, there would be no high blood pressure in Guildford, no further offences, and no more money for amoral lawyers.
Anyway, as Lord McAlpine wends his merry way through the entire membership of Twitter in his tireless mission not to cause hardship, perhaps he should (as I have argued so many times before) spare some time to ask himself why this kind of mob rule happens in the first place. That is to say:
* The police and judiciary remain complicit in not prosecuting or incarcerating paedophiles effectively
* Labour local Party organisations and Conservative clubs/donors/MPs and so forth cover up any attempts at proper detection.
* And family members or those with similar proclivities protect their kind, even though they are fully aware of the trauma being caused.
As always with those ‘in charge’, justice for the citizen comes a very poor last.
The Slog 