Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-11-20-Speech-2-172-000"

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"en.20121120.28.2-172-000"2
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"Madam President, as you will know, the United Kingdom has given notice that it intends to opt out of most of the justice and home affairs issues controlled currently by the European Union. If anybody does not understand why, let me introduce you to a young man called Andrew Symeou whom I visited in Athens a couple of years ago when he was detained under house arrest, who was a victim of what was very obviously a case of mistaken identity, as was established when the case finally came to court and was thrown out almost immediately. But in the meantime, this young man, who had gone to Greece celebrating his A-Level exams, had lost three years of his life, 11 months of them spent in one of the most unpleasant prisons in Europe. How do you give that back to a boy of that age? We complain about the length of detention – there was a great row in Britain about 42 days being too long. He was three years without the case so much as coming to trial. My country’s greatest gift to the human race, our supreme export, was the concept of the rule of law and habeas corpus and the freedom of the individual and all of the things that go with the conception of the law being above the government rather than a projection of the wishes of the state. This is not some abstract issue of sovereignty: this is about the law being a protector of the individual and not an instrument of the government."@en1
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