Let me be upfront about something. I have no idea where the nearest law school is, and if I’d ever gone to university, a law degree would have been the last thing on my list — whether in Britain, Greece, or anywhere else. Legislation is not my territory. The closest I’ve come to it is skimming the occasional bill for a story, and like every journalist worth their press pass, I went straight for the explanatory memorandum — the actual meat of the thing. And no, I haven’t read the 170-page ruling that’s got everyone talking. Or almost everyone.
So let’s be clear: without legal training, without judicial experience, and without having ploughed through 170 pages of court reasoning, I’m not in a position to challenge the substance of a ruling on the grounds that I like or dislike the outcome. If I had 35 years on the bench instead of 35 years in journalism, perhaps I’d have stronger opinions on the matter.
What I do know — as does everyone — is that courts, in Cyprus and everywhere else, operate within the legal framework of their country. They apply the constitution and the laws as written. The boundaries of judicial power are not set by the judiciary itself. They are set by the other two branches of government: the executive and the legislature.
The furore that has erupted in the wake of the ruling on the Al Jazeera video raises some rather important questions that the relevant authorities and legal experts will eventually need to answer. Starting with the most basic one: did the judges and prosecutors actually break any law? Did they stray outside the established legal framework?
Much of the noise has centred on the video itself — which, as everyone now loudly insists, all of Cyprus has seen. What tends to get lost in the uproar is that the debate around that footage began long before any prosecutions were brought. The central question then, as now, was whether the video could hold up in court. Plenty of opinions were expressed. Many of them, notably, came from legislators — that is, from members of parliament.
So if everyone could see the gaps in the law — the loopholes around the admissibility of video evidence — what exactly stopped them from fixing it? If the parties and MPs suspected deliberate foot-dragging from the government, why didn’t they table a private member’s bill? They do it on a dozen other issues without breaking a sweat.
Had they done so back then, you can be absolutely certain that the very same people now howling at the prosecutors would be singing their praises.
And yet even now, rather than focusing on how to reform the legislation that produced this outcome, they’re off on tangents. Conspiracy theories about other videos. Alarm about precedents being set. And so on and so forth.
If they’re genuinely worried that this ruling could affect proceedings involving other footage, then what — precisely — is stopping these famously voluble legislators from introducing a bill and putting it to a vote? Parliament hasn’t dissolved yet. There’s still time. If they actually want to do it.
Instead of drowning in conspiracy theories, they might do well to look around the world a little. In Sweden, the one-party consent rule applies, and courts can admit recordings as evidence even when obtained unlawfully, provided the public interest warrants it. Similar principles operate in Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. Cypriot legislators would not be reinventing the wheel.
In any case, there is one trap that everyone — regardless of where they stand — must be careful not to fall into: the trap laid by those self-styled enemies of the system whose real aim is to hollow it out from within.
I’ve said it before in this column, and I’ll say it again: a flawed justice system is better than no justice system at all. Because a flawed one can be fixed.
