Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde, who served time in prison after he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl, won his second match at the Paris Olympics and received an even harsher reaction from the crowd on Wednesday than for his first match.
Some kind of institution with final decision making ability for disputes is needed, yes.
How would I have it structured? Something along these lines:
- The body itself is entirely transparent with all meetings and matters of discussion open to the public
- The body makes decisions by consensus
- The body is created to deal with a single issue and immediately disbanded thereafter.
- No single person can serve on such a body more than once.
- The members of the body are chosen by some kind of open, democratic process.
- There are otherwise no restrictions, requirements, or limitations upon the capacity of who can be on such a body (e.g. no age requirements, no citizenship requirements, etc.)
I’m not an expert and these aren’t exhaustive or anything, just a few ideas. Obviously the rules shouldn’t be decided by a single person, they should be decided by consensus.
Wouldn’t that require everyone to have extensive knowledge of the laws of the land? There’s a reason people go to law school for years. You can’t simplify a nation’s laws enough to have your system unless there was only one law and it was ‘whatever the kind says is illegal is illegal.’ You couldn’t even establish proper courtroom procedure that way because everyone would have to know what is and isn’t legally permissible.
No, not really - these kinds of decisions would be more along the lines of finding a fair resolution to a dispute, rather than the interpretation of specific law. That sort of thing is done with the intent to oppress, rather than remediate.
We basically have this system already for lots of crimes in certain legal systems based on the commonwealth, it’s called a jury.
So there also shouldn’t be laws? Because otherwise I’m not sure how matters of law should be settled like this if people aren’t familiar with the laws.
