[rayiner]

"Democracy" is tyranny of the majority. In our constitutional republics, we have courts as a check on democracy, and that's necessary. Sometimes, those courts strike down programs generally supported by the electorate. Sometimes that's necessary too, but it's always a subversion of democracy.

However, courts ultimately derive their principles of justice from the values and traditions of a people. That's why international tribunals can have no legitimacy. It makes utterly no sense for judges in other countries, representative of people in other countries with different values and traditions, to weigh in on the actions of elected officials in your country. That's why Americans broadly dislike the idea, and I'd guess the majority of Britons do too.

[SEMW]

> However, courts ultimately derive their principles of justice from the values and traditions of a people.

That's a valid POV, but it can hardly be stated as fact. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes its existence to a broad consensus that, actually, certain fundamental principles of human rights are universal, and a South African has as much of a right to not be tortured by his government as an Englishman does. Of course, not everyone agrees, but denying any kind of universal quality to human rights is a fairly... niche form of cultural relativism.

> That's why international tribunals can have no legitimacy.

Aaand that's just a non-sequitur. The ECtHR has legal legitimacy to rule on UK issues because the UK voluntarily signed the ECHR. Its rulings do not have direct effect in the UK, but have a certain amount of indirect effect nevertheless because Parliament passed a law in 1998 giving them that. (FWIW, since then, the ECHR - which was mostly drafted by an Englishman - can also be enforced domestically in UK courts, and the ECtHR have only rarely overruled UK courts on ECHR interpretation issues).

So the situation here is the executive (GCHQ) possibly acting in violation of the will of Parliament (as expressed in the HRA1998). Parliament has delegated the task of deciding when the executive has violated its law to various judicial bodies, domestic and international. That's not subverting democracy. It's enforcing it.

[gadders]

> which was mostly drafted by an Englishman

And unfortunately interpreted by activist judges from the continent.

[tptacek]

It's probably not enforcing democracy, since polls seem to show a overwhelming majority of Britons have problems with the ECHR.

[SEMW]

I could take issue with this implicit identification of 'democracy' with 'issue-by-issue 50%-majoritarian direct democracy' (i.e. the idea that democracy is whatever a >50% majority in a referendum would currently show on each issue taken separately). Many countries flirt with some elements of direct democracy (Switzerland goes furthest, that I know of), but none go that far. So the implication that that's the actual true form of democracy is arguably a bit silly.

...And this is getting perilously close to philosophical wankery over competing definitions of the word 'democracy', which doesn't make for a very interesting discussion, so I should probably stop there :)

[DanBC]

But why should a New York judge decide what happens in Alaska or Idaho?

[tptacek]

Well, first of all, they generally can't.

[DanBC]

There's 4 judges from New York on scotus.

[tptacek]

And in addition to the fact that they're 4 judges out of 9,800 total state and federal judges (which federal judges are also regionally allocated so as not to have Connecticut judges hearing Alaskan controversies), those four are extremely limited in which cases they can hear.

It's impossible to look at the US judicial system and come away with the conclusion that it heedless of the concerns of Floridians hearing Alaskan cases. The US system is almost literally the opposite of that.

[DanBC]

> those four are extremely limited in which cases they can hear.

And the ECHR are extremely limited in which cases they can hear. Thus, we agree that just as scotus doesn't mean that you have a bunch of gun-slingin' Texans passing laws to control the lives of portland Oregon hipsters, we don't have frog-eating French controlling the lives of the Roast Beefs.

[tptacek]

The limitation you're referring to is substantive, and the limitation I'm referring to is procedural. They aren't remotely the same thing. The implicit proposal you're referring to gives an unrepresentative international tribunal the power to override democratic process over a whole area of policy.

[rayiner]

Tell me how people in Montana feel about the three justices born in New York City: Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg? Tell me how much people in Montana like edicts coming down from Washington, D.C.?

We have a Supreme Court, and we need one because we're one country under one Constitution and one Federal Government, but it's been bitterly divisive and I don't know why any country would want to subject themselves to that without those constraints.