Prospect online this week
- Ben Rawlence and Uma Ramiah report from Kisengo in southeastern DR Congo, where the discovery earlier this year of the mineral coltan—used to manufacture capacitors in mobile phones—has proved to be a mixed blessing.
- Lucy Wadham explains how the Sarkozy divorce reveals the rise of something insidious in France—the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards privacy.
- Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, replies to Alex Carlile’s attack on Liberty’s report comparing pre-charge detention periods across countries.
- Bella Thomas on the strange response to Andrew Anthony’s book Fall-Out.
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This passion for Anglo-Saxon but here read American and Canadian transparency is yet another media mogul’s dream ticket for a supine British pro-american republican public. Whatever the Canadians say the world is about, the French system is a logical one that protects people’s privacy from undue exposure by evil paparazzi. It is not only logical but sensible and Britons need to sign up to the Human Rights Act they keep telling european judges they believe in.
The right to privacy is enshrined on the statute book in London and in Brussels for serious historical reasons. If we adopt Canadian media mogul values a la Murdoch and erase every restraint on the subject of privacy, then we shall have no defence when this love affair with all things North American ceases. The European Convention enshrined the right to privacy in ECHR law because nasty German ober-leiutenants kicked in this door and then many others when they were invading Jewish shops and businesses and dragging children off to be experimented upon by their even more nastier dentists.
Britons are notoriously weak on their history – history does go back further than last Saturday’s football results we may be shocked to learn. Let’s hear it for Elizabeth I the Warrior Princess and her sterner successor Elizabeth II both of whom now look like the Maid of Orleans in their armour – and more’s the better. Elizabeth I did believe in a right to privacy for all – unless of course one was a nasty political Jesuit pursuing a personal assassination policy and destabilising a constitutional monarchy – much like our Canadian media mogul’s spiritual directors seem to be advising. So whether Rupert likes it or not – and I am not speaking of Rupert of St Trinian’s fame – privacy law is now law. Judges will advise the paparazzis of this when they send them down.
Rico