I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.
One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.
Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well EDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)
David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.
Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.
Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.
Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.
I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.
One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.
Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years,
and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as wellEDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.
Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.
Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.
Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.