During the Labour party conference Home Secretary Alan Johnson revealed yet another reason to boot the party out at the next election.
Renewing Labour’s pledge to ‘clampdown on crime’ (read: creating more punishments and bureaucracy under the pretence of ‘action’), he has unveiled plans to bar alleged wife beaters from their homes through the Domestic Violence Protection Order. “Go" Orders can be placed on suspects, banning them from their homes for up to two weeks, while allowing victims of abuse time to consider legal action.
Apparently, this has been dreamt up to close a ‘loophole’ in legislation whereby the Police can only ‘protect’ a victim of domestic violence if a suspect has been charged with a crime. This ‘loophole’ sounds horribly similar to the long-standing practice in the UK of no-one having their liberty infringed upon without sufficient evidence to suggest it is in the public interest to do so.
If the police cannot prove a crime has been committed and an alleged suspect has not been charged, let alone convicted of an act, then that suspect has every right to be treated as a law-abiding citizen. It is inevitable that some of those banned from their own home will be guiltless and that some people affected by this order will not have charges brought against them. These people would be seriously wronged by such measure.
The breaking of a “Go" Order could land you in the magistrates for Contempt of Court and risking imprisonment. In practise, Johnson is stating that someone who has not even been charged with a crime could face a spell in jail, simply for breaking an order that was imposed without evidence and without justification.
Whilst in power New Labour has continually undermined a major right in the UK legal system: the presumption of the accused’s innocence until proven guilty. They have treated those yet to be tried as convicts through the use of Control Orders and treated those proven innocent as guilty through the retention of details on the DNA database. They are now seeking to treat as guilty those who are yet to be even charged with a crime.
