Serious Crime Prevention Orders: punishing people who haven’t broken any laws
Readers may recall the proposals for Serious and Organised Crime Prevention Orders being discussed here last year.
Now, as commented on in the Telegraph, the British government has published the Serious Crime Bill, Part 1 of which introduces this measure (under the revised term “Serious Crime Prevention Orders”).
According to the Telegraph article:
Until yesterday, we fondly believed that only a jury could decide whether any of us had committed a serious crime. That fundamental principle was torn up when the Government published its Serious Crime Bill.
This allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” — anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And:
The second condition for a serious crime prevention order is that the court has reasonable grounds for believing it would prevent, restrict, or disrupt involvement by a person in a serious crime in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.