Let us say, broadly speaking, that the modern world has experienced three systems of administering justice.
The first is the Western-style system, in which specific charges are brought against you, and you are granted the right to look your judge in the eye and defend yourself with whatever arguments and procedural tricks your lawyer can devise—even if you are the worst scoundrel on the planet.
The scoundrel may ultimately get away with it, but what can we do? This is the risk that Western civilization has chosen to take every time it undertakes the difficult task of ensuring a fair trial.
And it is non-negotiable: during the Nuremberg Trials, a scoundrel like Hermann Göring almost ended up being presented to society as innocent and beyond reproach.
In the second type, the indictment is usually as vague and general as the accusation of “treason” itself.
You roughly know what you are accused of, but in any case, the best thing you can do is confess your guilt without unnecessary complications.
Theoretically, this is because the charges have been formulated in the name of “people’s democracy,” and “people’s democracy” knows what you have done—even if you yourself have no idea.
Confess so that we can finish with this, and your legal representative would do well to support your confession as well.
Otherwise?
Otherwise, one can read the novella by Georgy Demidov, a political prisoner in the Gulag for 14 years, whose story was brought to the cinema last year by Sergei Loznitsa.
It is the tragedy of an idealistic state prosecutor in the Soviet Union of 1937, and the film “Two Prosecutors” (Zwei Staatsanwälte) belongs to the category of works that film critics call “little gems.”
The third is a more Asian-style system of justice, where you are arrested without even having charges brought against you.
You are simply taken away, as happened to Nobel Prize-winning Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, who was held for months in an unknown location without access to his lawyer.
At least he eventually learned that he was accused of “inciting subversion of state power.”
Liu Xia, the writer’s wife and a visual artist, was placed under years-long house arrest without ever learning the reason.
It was enough that the state authorities knew it.
It does not take much thought to understand that we live in the best part of the world, even when some people try to make our lives worse.
Elsewhere, justice is nothing more than a mechanism for crushing human beings—a press that does not even allow their breath to be heard.
Here, it can even be transformed into a tragicomedy, as Dimitris Psathas did in the 1960s.
In Italy in the 1990s, it even became a television show, where a judge wearing his robe and ceremonial ribbons resolved cases such as:
“I asked a friend of mine to transport ten bottles of wine in her car for my celebration. She suddenly stepped on the brakes, the bottles broke, and now she does not want to pay me for them.”
Santi Licheri was a real judge. He could ask whether the driver had also pulled the handbrake, only to utter at the end of every episode a phrase that became as famous as he was:
“Mi ritiro per deliberare” — “I withdraw to deliberate.”
A former official of state power, Grigoris Dimitriadis, is attempting to make journalists’ lives worse.
He takes them to court through so-called “abusive lawsuits” (or SLAPPs), demanding enormous sums in compensation.
Except that the Western system of justice recognized, through its lens, a method of crushing people that resembles those used by other regimes.
Here, in our parts of the world, says the court that rejected his third consecutive lawsuit (this time against in.gr), the right to sharp criticism on matters of public interest and issues of legitimate concern is recognized.
Here, among us, it further states, the European Convention on Human Rights applies.
This is how it happens in the best part of the world.
Someone whose name is connected to a case taken straight out of “The Lives of Others” devises a mechanism of purges like those in “Two Prosecutors.”
But—with the necessary dose of Psathas-style tragicomedy—he ends up as the one who loses the case.
