RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pakistans-emergency-order-prevents-release-of-men-convicted-of-murdering-wsj-reporter-daniel-pearl/

Pakistani authorities on Thursday issued an emergency order preventing the release of four prisoners convicted in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, a day after their convictions were overturned.

British national Omar Saeed Sheikh was convicted in 2002 for the murder of Pearl earlier that year, but his death sentences for abduction, murder, and terrorism were reduced to seven years for one charge of kidnapping. The convictions of three Pakistani men as accomplices to Sheikh were thrown out completely.

The appeals court in Karachi ruled earlier this week that there was a lack of evidence against Sheikh and his alleged accomplices and rejected computer evidence that the men sent ransom notes after Pearl was kidnapped.

The Sindh government used the Maintenance of Public Order law to detain the four men for another 90 days, arguing that they could threaten law and order in the province if released.

“I am shocked at the decision, especially its timing,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi remarked of the appeals court decision, saying the ruling harms Pakistan’s recent anti-terrorist efforts, for which he said they have sacrificed greatly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/yes-hungarys-emergency-law-is-flawed/

The lack of a sunset clause is worrisome. But pace Anne Applebaum, it doesn’t herald a “dictatorship.”

In a tweet that has now been followed by more than 100 tweeters, Anne Applebaum says she’s “looking forward to the justifications” for the Hungarian government’s state of emergency law responding to the COVID-19 crisis from Rod Dreher, from “so many others,” and from me. She also speculates on what our justifications might be. Will it be “justified by circumstances”? Or “the people support it”? Or some “whataboutism”?

As Ms. Applebaum has pointed out in The Atlantic magazine, the Danube Institute, of which I’m president, has received funding from the Batthyanyi Foundation, which itself gets money from the Hungarian government. I invite those who think my opinions tainted by this to visit our website, on which we post all our events, to judge if that is so. Ms. Applebaum presumably doesn’t think so because she has just asked me, rather than Viktor Orban, for my opinion. And my response is an eirenic one:

I don’t justify the emergency law as it stands.

As an old classical liberal of a conservative disposition, I accept there will be occasions when a crisis is so severe that a government needs emergency powers to deal with it outside the regular law. The coronavirus threat is plainly such a challenge. If a law granting emergency powers to the government to deal with it is proposed, however, I would submit it to certain tests before supporting it.

The tests are those most people would impose. First, is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/soft-authoritarianism-comes-to-hungary/

But Hungarian democracy is not a lost cause.

The trouble with crying wolf is that sometimes the wolf shows up at your door. For years, critics have said that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban is a tin-pot dictator, Central Europe’s answer to Vladimir Putin. The flaws in Hungary’s democracy and Orban’s own no-holds-barred approach to electioneering were held up as the decisive factors behind his political success, while other explanations—the advantages of incumbency, the pre-pandemic strength of the Hungarian economy, the divided state of the opposition—were downplayed or ignored. For those committed to the ideological project of ever-closer European integration, Orban’s outspoken nationalism, his Euroscepticism, and his strident opposition to immigration made him a particularly inviting target.

Now, however, the Hungarian government’s heavy-handed response to the coronavirus threatens to vindicate Orban’s critics. On March 30, the Hungarian Parliament passed emergency legislation that allows Orban to indefinitely govern by decree and threatens jail time for anyone spreading false or misleading information about the pandemic. Technically, Parliament can revoke this extraordinary grant of power with another vote, but Orban’s Fidesz party controls an overwhelming legislative majority.