Constitutional state and populism
Populists say that independent justice system would not serve democracy, because judges are living far away from reality. Normally the argument for that is that judges make solutions, which is not in the line with common opinion. In many arguments, the judge is the government official, whose mission is to serve the state as well as the police organization. And sometimes I have heard opinions that when the prosecution has been raised against foreign people, those people just should kick off from the country because the legal proceedings are just a waste of money.
That kind of argumentation is sometimes very effective for the "regular people", who have not have to see things, what they don't want to see. And this kind of thing the argument about the laws, what are criminalizing things like homosexuality and another kind of that, whom person self cannot effect.
But do you know, why we have a court system? Its mission is to deny the police and government officials make crimes. If we would not have neutral trials, where also persecuted people have a chance to defend themselves, the officials would try to put their illegal acts to other people's fault.
The thing in the populism is that it is a very good tool in the hands of the politicians. We must remember that the destruction of the Warsaw Pact caused the new kind of information technology, which allowed people to communicate with together without state control.
And new popular politicians revolutionize democracy. But that advantage continues, and the problem in the ex-eastern block nations is that there has ever been a democracy. People are grown for respecting or rather saying obey the government, and they have ever been in the world, where the politician is the same kind of person as they are.
They are not adjusted to the public decision-making process, and because of the rights like gathering are new, the politicians use that kind of thing for making their position stronger. When we are thinking about people's relationship with governments, we are seeing one very interesting thing, and that is that police is more confessing in the eyes of the people than some judge, who gives the convictions in the closed rooms.
In the past, some people had an attitude, that when police arrested people, that person was convicted at the same moment. The model was taken from Mickey Mouse cartoon, where police take criminals to prison right away when they are put to the handcuffs. This is the problem with publicity. When the police would arrest people, the interest in the case ends. People thought that the person was convicted right away, and they were ever returned.
This happened in countries like Finland, where the press was free, at least if we would compare the situation to the Eastern block. And in Eastern block the political arresting caused that people believe, that police ever made mistakes. In fact, in some criminal cases, the officials raised two prosecutions, another was about normal crime, and the second one was a political crime like agitation. And the person left to jail anyway, what made sure that police must ever confess that it makes mistakes.
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