Paging Clegg and Browne: why has the Home Office given up on innocent until proven guilty?
Why has the Home Office started calling people arrested “offenders”? Arrested – not charged, not tried, not found guilty but only so far arrested.
Innocent until proven guilty is meant to be the theory, and the Home Office should certainly know that.
Yet take a look at their press release about yesterday’s arrests of people accused of breaking immigration law:
Headline – Immigration offenders arrested in Home Office operations
Lead paragraph – Home Office enforcement teams have arrested 139 immigration offenders
Second paragraph – More than 130 immigration offenders have been arrested
Only when you get further down does that little matter of innocent until proven guilty raise its head and a “suspected” gets thrown in.
It’s a dreadful, sloppy and inaccurate piece of work by the Home Office – and something that should cause Nick Clegg and Lib Dem Home Office minister Jeremy Browne to act.
You see, I think that these tweets are just wrong anyway. If someone is found guilty at the end of due process, then by all means comment on it, like the Police do at the end of trials. I don’t like the idea of people being rounded up into vans if they’ve been stopped at a tube station and been unable to produce proof of their immigration status.Surely the likelihood is that most of them will be perfectly innocent.
It’s awfully heavy handed and not the sort of approach that should be taken. It’s all about pandering to UKIP at the expense of people’s rights.
We really, really have to make it clear that this type of pandering to the Conservative right/ UKIP is NOT what we are about. If we are silent it will be taken that we are happy to go along with this. This is so sad after the years of working to progress harmony within our diverse communities. If the ‘ordinary’ person in the street see their Government behaving like this they feel it gives a validity to their own predujices