The Abuse of Power: Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Hewitt's book is an insightful, unnerving look into the day-to-day practices of a country heretofore presumed to be the champion of human rights throughout the world: Great Britain. The Abuse of Power shatters the rose colored glasses Britain has held out to the world for viewing the individual civil and political rights in that long-standing democracy. Incident after incident compiled and reported in this book exposes to the world how the civil and political liberties of selected groups or classes of persons living in, or seeking admission to, Britain are trammeled upon from entry to Parliamentary. It illustrates how Britain's vaguely worded, open-ended criminal laws allow for arbitrary, selective enforcement by the authorities. This arbitrary enforcement allows law-making by appointed to enforce the rather than by those elected to make it. Laws dealing with manner of individual activity, from immigration to homosexuality, are shown to be vague, discriminatory, and often arbitrarily (and on occasion retrospectively) enforced. In her expos6 on the British criminal justice system the author contends that the police department nurtures the notion that all charged with a criminal offence are guilty and that the purpose of the trial is to c nfirm the police officer's decison In support of this position she cites the Dimbley Lecture of 1973, wherein the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner criticized the pretrial and trial process for... its 50 per cent failure rate. Based upon the premise that and detention itself is a punishment, a story of police abuse and parliamentary palavering regarding personal liberty leaps from page after page of this lighted candle. The author identifies the present police policy to make greater use of the arrest and detention procedure, as opposed to the summons procedure, bec use it makes the alleged offense easi r to investigate. The author grants that although English law is but silent where detention is concerned, the police have not generally taken advantage of the void. Ninety-five percent of detainees are charged or released within twentyfour hours. But there are few safeguards for the remaining five percent suspected of grave offenses. In one such case the court suggested that forty-eight hours would be the maximum tolerable detention time. To date Parliament has not seen fit to take any action to address the detention issue with a view to eliminating the void or to support the court's proposed forty-eight hour detention limitation.