There are some very important principles that build what we consider a modern democracy: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the privacy of citizens, transparency and government accountability and due process or law. In some cases, all of them come to stand together in both series wreck traffic. Let's see how this can happen, and what we learn from it.
There are many principles that must be implemented if we want to call a somewhat modern society. Let's take a look at some of the most important
There is freedom of the press - a free press has the authority and the ability to report on this that the authorities are doing, how they execute the power vested in them. Closely linked to freedom of expression , you have the right to express an opinion and to communicate what you observe, among others.
is because of the law - someone charged with a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but equally important that once they have served their time and paid their debt to society, they are once again an entirely innocent citizen
.is accountability and transparency of government , which means that the three branches of government - legislative, executive and judicial - must exercise their powers in a way that allows citizens to hold responsible for their exercise of power.
is private lives , which says that citizens have the right to their seven intimacies (privacy body, correspondence, data, economy, identity , location and territory).
This week, all these principles are collided head in a train wreck event that makes for a very interesting case study.
Ten years ago, I argued that if all judicial verdicts must be available on request as public documents, because citizens and the press must be able to hold the judiciary responsible for their exercise of power, there was a point not to the court verdicts available in digital format. Instant judicial verdicts were downloadable by the courts, it would take less than a day for someone to put them in a database and make them searchable for eternity, making a small offense will never disappear.
After all, if we condemn someone to 30 days in jail, we do not condemn as five years of unemployment and perhaps even homeless because nobody wants to deal with them. If this is the effect, the system has serious and regular failure of the law does not.
This is exactly what happened this week in Sweden, the company Lexbase opened a fully searchable database of all verdicts, put red dots on a map if a house had been involved in a court document. Acquitted, convicted, pursue your local power company, even being a witness - no matter if you have been named in a court document, your home has a red dot. In addition, Lexbase recorded as an online diary, giving them formal authority to republish official documents of the authorities (courts) in this way.
When people look at the map, it does not even have to be the person living there today who was involved in some form of action -. the person living there at the time of the judicial proceedings
kicker? If you want to read the because for that red dot on a house, Lexbase wants about $ 9.95. Until then, he just says "was sort of contact with the law, probably embarrassing."
This is a very interesting case study where tons of interesting principles come into frontal collision. It is technically a newspaper, he not have the right to publish court documents - even excerpts from them such as points on a map - which is what the free press did. You can not ban it without serious consequences. Yet many other principles have been slaughtered in the process
due process -. Someone is innocent until proven guilty. People who had served their debt to society were again convicted of an unspecified something through this publication, and many people who are not in judicial proceedings in all were handed suspicion just living somewhere happened to be involved in an earlier court case. Not to mention that all court documents have a red dot - even if you had been acquitted of anything
Privacy - it would be a part of due process :. If you had served your debt to society for a crime, while the person longer matter
accountability and transparency -. the courts are to provide documentation of their verdicts, because if not, the branch of the violence-wielding government can not be held responsible. We can not have a society with secret courts and secret verdicts.
Today, it is far from clear where the line is when important principles collide like this, and the ability to process mass and mass-view data has turned many assumptions on their head. Sort this will be one of the major challenges for our government checks and balances in the coming decades.
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