Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Why courts decide
The abuse complained of in that case was that one of the accused persons had been incited by an informer and a customs officer to commit the offences in question and had lured him into the court’s jurisdiction. The court in Latif held that it was for a court to consider whether the abuse complained of was such as to justify a stay of proceedings. Mr Mpshe assigned to himself the role reserved for courts. If he had had proper regard to the decision in Latif, he would not have used it to justify the decision to discontinue the prosecution. Thus, he ignored relevant material such as the relevant dicta in Zuma, Latif and the appeal court judgment in HKSAR. The courts in the latter two cases were emphatic that allegations of abuse of process were within the remit of the trial court.
