Star Chambers with a Smiley Face

"It is time people realized that “human rights codes” are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual. They cannot be wielded by the individual against the state, as independent civil and criminal courts could be. They are star chambers used, and designed to be used, to mount show trials, in which persons who fail to snap to attention when commissar issues the latest political corrections may be publicly demonized. By removing all of their victims’ established legal protections -- presumption of innocence, the right to know one’s accuser, to be tried by a jury of one’s peers, et cetera -- they put a jackboot directly in the teeth of the tradition of human liberty descending from Magna Charta."

David Warren