Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-12-Speech-4-181"
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"en.20090312.26.4-181"2
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"Mr President, the growth of a corpus of international jurisprudence not anchored in any elected national legislature is one of the most alarming developments of our age. We are reversing not just 300 years of legal understanding of territorial responsibility, that is, that a crime is the responsibility of the territory where it is committed; we are also going back to the pre-modern idea that people who decide on laws should not be accountable to the people who live under them, but rather only to their own consciences.
It might seem very reasonable that, if a man like Milošević or a man like Karadžić is not receiving justice in his own country, we need to do something about it. But the objection to authoritarians like Milošević is precisely that they vitiated the democracy of their country and set themselves up as being above the law. If we replicate that problem internationally, we drag ourselves down to his level, as we did with the farce of a trial we had in The Hague, where for six years we had 27 changes of legal procedure, imposition of counsel and, ultimately, no conviction.
I am not in favour of Mr Milošević: he was a baleful and wicked Communist. But bad men deserve justice – bad men, especially, deserve justice – and when they do not get it, it is the rest of us who are diminished."@en1
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