December 10, 2003

More Depressing News

Editor deemed 'national threat' - www.smh.com.au via Boingboing

Really, after days of reading stuff like this, I want to post a kid's picture holding a stuffed panda or something, just to offset the bad stuff. But here we go again -- now someone's being denied entry *because* they're a foreign journalist.

Now, from this version of the story, it says that she had no visa. OK, you want to deny entry because of a bad visa, sure.

But a) this woman was a working journalist, and was proveably so; b) this woman had been here before, a number of times; c) she was held for 15 hours before being allowed access to her consul, not a long time, but not exactly friendly-like to someone who's from a "friendly" country.

But being told what she's being held for is not just polite, it's a basic tenant of democracy. Habeus corpus is so engrained in our society, it's hard to imagine people being detained without it. One of the primary tenants of habeus corpus is detailing what crime the accused stands charged with -- and that includes while the person is being detained.

Terrorists may have bombed us, but we're tearing our own society apart for them.

Posted by Ted Stevko at December 10, 2003 05:56 AM | TrackBack
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