I have just returned from Ankara. The total number of prisoners in Turkey more than doubled between 2005 and this year, from 55,000 to 130,000. Many are held without charge, pending eventual trial, often under the Terrorism Law. 175 persons per 100,000 population are now gaoled. Turkey imprisons about twice as many journalists as either Iran or China, and also a significant number of lawyers.
In spite of the the above, and of the still unresolved Turkish/Kurdish conflict, some commentators describe the authoritarian Turkish state as “an Islamic model of democracy for the Middle East”!
7 years without a trial.
Soon to be extradite to the US for acts here.
Now if the evidence isn’t available for a prosecution here, there isn’t the evidence to extradite them, is there.
Yes. If there is sufficient evidence to prosecute, crimes committed in UK shuld be tried here.
And if there isn’t sufficient evidence to prosecute, should people be extradited on the basis not having the evidence?
BBC TV News told us that Turkey has the same democraphic cross-section of population as does Syria
(?)
How is that “exemplary” ?
I think the mix of population in Syria is more complex than that in Turkey. Turkey at present is an examle of an authoritarian state.
@Lord Hylton:
It is indeed a horrible situation. However, our practices are hardly something to put up as a good act to follow. We have had a man in jail for ‘eight years’ without trial, or, even knowing what he could be charged with. This is outrageous.
How can a man spend eight years in jail without knowing what he is accused of? We cannot bang on about the desperate situation in other countries when we are at the same game.
Add to that, the EU now agreeing to its citizens, all of us, being sent to a foreign country to face trial, as they are considered to have courts better equipped than here or Europe. What a disgrace that is. How can we stand this kind of humiliation in our own environment toward our own people? And then feel we can address Turkey on their human rights issues. That is hypocracy.
Time to clean up at home before looking to preach elsewhere. To send our people for trial in the USA is indeed against their human rights. Unless they committed the offence whilst in the USA. Not whilst the wording is passed over cyber space to some poduct place they have there. That country does not have what we would regard as a fair system. Not at all.
It simply doesn’t make moral or practical sense. Any of it.
The projected increase in prison population
in UK from 70,000 to 80,000 has presumably been achieved by the management/home office.
Our own figures are not too bad (though I agree with Blagger’s comments)considering that the population has increased from 50 to 60million without a commensurate increase until the lid was taken off prison building
3-4 years ago after Lord Woolf’s (cheers for Lord Woolf) unsuccessful campaign for rationing intake to equal out-chuck from the prisons.
Noble Lord Hylton’s life time campaign is a worthwhile one but the perspective that it only removes examination of the local ie UK
problems, by concentrating on foreign ones, the usual ploy of propaganda services.
What does concern me is crime in the Uk police force itself, and i am still concerned with the involvement of the Dorset police with the bancrupt Icelandic bank, whose receivers boldly claimed recently that “All creditors had been repaid”.
I put the question “How many debtors had not repaid once the bancrupt bank had gone in to liquidation and how many of the debtors were
working members of the dorset police force?
Furthermore is it standard practice for police inspectors to take £15,000 three week holidays for family in Thailand, whilst investigating “Thai crime”, and if it is, what basis is there for paying for such vacations out of the public pocket.
Either it is out of the public pocket or it is conveniently out of the non repayment of debt to the Icelandic bank loans promoted by Dorset police.
Is petty larceny the favored crime of all policemen everywhere, or is it not?????????
Lord Hylton is some what duplicitous in diverting attention from corruption in the UK
to corruption and crime in another country over which we have no say at all.
Whilst Lord Hylton diverts attention from Uk policing and imprisonment, it came to my attention recently in the same said county above that the use of “Straw men” to give false evidence against entirely innocent men, unable to accept that a particular charge had any relevance to them at all, that the use of such straw men is COMMON PRACTICE. (I have one clear sample of it, and the perjurer too)
If that is so then what in heaven’s names is noble Lord Hylton prattling on about, except to convince himself of his own importance as a catholic “resolver of conflicts”, which he presumably thinks other denominations are inadequate to do ???
Charity begins at home but what happens when you have not got one?
@Twm:
Couldn’t be because prisons and the law has become big business run by ‘private’ concerns could it? You know, expand the business, improve production, keep the inmates coming, all at tax payers expense. Nice littel earner that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lTDJaLmku4&feature=fvsr
And more thinking on this matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt6gPZO8XRw
And here we see we are on the same road as the ‘Superland.’
http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/private-prisons
Why is our government not telling us we are in fact becoming a State of the USA? Why are they hiding the truth regarding the extent of our involvement with that country?
Scroll down to the United Kingdom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/51st_state
This may interest a few people.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_187876.pdf
Whether the prisons are run by the state or by private enterprise is really neither here nor there. They are still big business. The figures for prisoners in the USA is huge, but they do actually earn for their captors quite ften, whereas as far as I know very few of the British convicts do.
Our figure of 80,000 (4,000 women included) for a pop of 60m is quite low compared with many countries. Even that is a small city by most undeveloped country standards.
NZ has a notably low population of inmates; all that open space to play in!
Where the prisons are located in the UK to house so many more people, the 10,000 extra deemed about two years ago, heaven only knows.
@Twm:
Oh, but it is definitely here and there.
When prisons were/are run by the State, they take on the projected morality and expectation of legitimate punishment by and for the nation. Paid for by the people to the people as victims. Inmates are us, as the Lords are so aware, it being sprinkled with quite a few of them.
When it is a private ‘money’ making concern, it is no longer of the people, it is a business in the full sense of that understanding. Duty and morality toward the criminal, which can be anyone of us, goes out of the window. For it becomes a project to make money for investors. How can you contemplate a situation other than exploitation in the worst sense when you feel that businesses should be able to use, for ‘their’ money making gain, not the publics gain, who pay for the individuals to be in there as retribution for their uncivil acts, but for those in it for money.
That is crazy thinking. And as a result you set up crazy barbarism and blind eyes are once again turned. The inmates then become inhuman to the ‘company’ running them and no sense of duty toward them is cultivated. For duty and rehabilitation cost money, which reduce profit. Not to mention their idea is not to reform, for this business, like any other business, wants its customers to return and often. They are, after all, the source of income needed to enhance their growth and keep the profits mounting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjZqBATcPbQ
And here is the corruption you are looking to promote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXH3DlW3vMs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWmRwDdRBNA
And inside those horrendous businesses that you are backing on and for the behalf of the people of this country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvqj8hgxRfg
What you have to ask yourself is, has this brutality and private prison experiment reduced crime in that place you are now sending our citizens to serve time? One or two of them, people who have not committed what is considered an offence in this country.
I think we should be sending one or two Lords to serve time there in those private jails they wish to emulate, so that they can enlighten us all as to the results.
This is utter madness.
“Our Father which art in Heaven…” (the heaven that Twm mentions as alone always “knowing”); (versus)
“Our prisoners who art in heaven (on Earth compared with the democratic competitive-individual-human-development challenges they would face under their ‘freedom on the Outside’)”.
morality and expectation of legitimate punishment by and for the nation.
This still applies unless the judges are employed by private enterprise and that would be something else!
In the days of Hywel’s law and Brehonster’s law (Brewster) of Ireland, (11thc onwards) self employed itinerant judges did make such decisions on behalf of the communities who employed them.
The case of there being any real difference between the function of state capitalism and private capitalism is certainly not proven,
Any more than private ownership of a nearby toll road makes any difference to the use of the road.
The private/state transactions are different; the function and use is the same.