UK Still Has Slavery, Also Has Laws to Fight It

Home Office Secretary Theresa May recently passed a Modern Slavery bill that will allow victims of slavery to seek compensation and reparations from their traffickers, or employers, especially those who had had them work illicitly in improper occupations. 

I can’t believe that our country still has slavery. Sure, there are human traffickers, who sell people, including children, to brothels, black market companies and other organisations, but what I’m talking about is localized slavery. Yes, your dear neighbour.

I had a neighbour once, and their family had a domestic helper named Tina. She was from Morocco as I recall. Every day, the family will leave, but Tina was locked up from behind the door. She was told never to shout or cry for help outside. One time, I was walking beside her employer and she was following us. I could notice that she was malnourished.

I wanted to take it to authorities, but some colleagues said there was no law that protected domestic helpers. In the UK, it was always the citizen first, the migrants secondary, despite the fragrant words the world hears on television.

Maybe this law, along with other laws, will help these migrants, who came into the country to support their own families back in their country, have a right to the UK justice system. Nobody deserves to be treated like a slave, either through human trafficking or domestic imprisonment.

Clare’s Law and the Sanctity of Relationships

Now, before you think this is a “holy” type of post, I’d just like to clarify that sanctity in the title meant “honesty” or “values” in a relationship. I just want to point out here that the new Clare’s Law, or the Domestic Violence DisclosureScheme, while it protects individuals, it may also breed mistrust. 

I am all for the safety of our women and girls, but researching about the history of your partner, with his or her own knowledge, is a way of degrading the “honesty” and “genuine-ness” of relationships. Sure, it could be a romantic and less-than-practical notion, but why bother partnering up in a relationship if you could not even trust each other?

Potentially, the law can save lives, but is this law really necessary? Maybe it is, for people who look for partners in online dating and matchmaking websites. It will also be helpful especially in divorce cases, but the previous example is already an irony.

Definitely, it will really be nice to know that you have a good premise during divorce because you know that your partner has a violent history, but do you plan to get into a relationship just so you could get a divorce?

There is nothing wrong with Clare’s law, but intimate trust, understanding, patience and good values will always make a good relationship, not a back-end solution. There is nothing wrong with the law being passed, but if people use it to concern themselves of their partners, they were already planning to fail the relationship.

BMJ Report Accuses Several UK Medical Universities of Racism

A British Medical Journal report “Academic Performance of Ethnic Minority Candidates and Discrimination in the MRCGP Examinations Between 2010 and 2012: Analysis of Data,” claims that MRCGP examiners discriminate in the exams of Asian, Indian and Black doctors compared to white doctors. According to the authors, General Practice Professor Aneez Esmail and Biostatistics Professor Chris Roberts, medical universities have a bias when giving out their MRCGP examinations.

Today, the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) has filed a legal case against UK’s Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the General Medical Council (GMC) for the MRCGP examinations biased against minority ethnic candidates. This legal case puts medical practitioners minorities in the UK on the spotlight.

Esmail and Roberts’  report showed that Black and minority ethnic graduates trained in the UK were likely to fail than their white UK counterparts in their first attempt at a clinical skills assessment exam. Black and minority ethnic candidates who trained abroad also had a greater likeliness to fail in the exam. The likeliest to fail are minority candidates who did not train or study in the United Kingdom.

According to the lawyer of BAPIO, Attorney William O’Neill, should BAPIO win the case, it will mean good quality medical graduates from universities regardless of ethnicity, which would give the NHS the boost it needs to provide quality medical service.

Source

No Win No Fee: Is It Really Bad For All Of Us?

In January this year, the UK Legal Ombudsman had ordered lawyers to repay more than £1 million in compensation for misleading consumers regarding the No Win No Fee confusion, or the Conditional Fee Arrangement (CFA) used by most lawyers, solicitors and claims handling companies.

According to the Legal Ombudsman, it said that it “begun to see cases where the fundamental promise, which underpins the marketing of these arrangements- that the consumer will not have to pay for losing cases-is being broken.”

Truthfully, no win no fee is something I’d prefer because it enabled me to reclaim refunds from my bank without much trouble. I did not mind paying back 25%. However, most claims handling firms now concentrate on the viability of a client’s success rather than fulfilling their duties to represent any client in court.

The viability of success, coupled with legal intelligence, had resulted into widespread disasters for the insurance industry. Insurance premiums have skyrocketed in rates, deeply affecting younger drivers applying for car and personal injury insurance.

No win no fee can be misleading because in the end, clients will need to pay undisclosed fees. If legal representatives will not make their statements clear to avoid hidden costs or misleading information, then it would be better to banish no win no fee from the legal system once and for all.

Don’t Take It to a Lawsuit at Once, Be Fair

We might say laws are meant to be broken, but being fair is more important. 

A neighbour of mine recently told me her story regarding her neighbour who moved out because she filed a litigation against their family without even warning them about a petty little thing. Since this country, the UK, has a compensation-culture society, anybody could get affordable legal help even if the legal aid cuts the government can implement any time.

But, this litigation culture can also damage personal reputations, particularly one’s social connections and well-being. My neighbour demand that their neighbours avoid looking indecent when sunbathing; they sunbathe naked without minding the passers-by across the area.

Sure, sunbathing naked is quite offensive and obscene right? I told her she could have sent a warning or a letter to them explaining why she found it indecent. However, she directly for a lawsuit.

A litigation is intimidating because it pits another person to definite terms in the law that he or she violated. Instead of appealing to their common sense, taking them directly against the wall can be offensive or unnatural.

My neighbour said that if she hadn’t done it, our area’s property values would have fallen. She asked me what could have happened if a media spectacle or a Youtube video was posted of it. I just said that it is still fair that she should have sent and explained these things to her neighbours first.

Fairness and ethics is important to retain in one side even if the other party does not bother to have or to learn them. This aids the law in defending who is truly right.

Tax Avoidance is not the Same as Tax Evasion

Many governments all over the world seem intent on blurring the lines between tax avoidance and tax evasion. Lawmakers are gumming it up to the abuse of benefits and exemptions by many people. Sure it is quite unfair that celebrities could hire professional accountants that help them reduce the amount of taxes they pay, but it is really because they could manage the finances effectively that they could reduce their taxes.

With the lack of knowledge of tax avoidance, a blue-collar worker pays 10% of his or her salary to the government. A celebrity with professional accountants could reduce that amount to 3% at best by tax returns, exemptions and benefits.

We’ve heard of people marrying for convenience because bearing children could effectively reduce the taxes couples pay. Add to that the combination of declaring the lower-rate taxpaying partner being the primary breadwinner, then their taxes are effectively reduced as well.

Declaring that tax avoidance is the same as tax evasion is declaring that knowledge is something damnable. I think that a better solution to the problem would be the reduction of the beneficiary taxes based on income, not declaring those who understand the law to be abusing the system.

Investigation into US, UK Surveillance Laws to be conducted by UN CT Official

 

Ben Emmerson, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism announced that he and a team will launch an investigation into the surveillance activities and laws of the National Security Agency of the United States and the UK’s GCHQ. According to Emmerson, the UN has many questions it needs answered and these were “too important to ignore”.

According to Emmerson, the United Nations wants to know if Edward Snowden, who revealed everything regarding the operations of the NSA and the GCHQ, is deserving of the legal protection given to whistleblowers or his efforts only weakened the US/ UK counterterrorism defense systems. Another question will be if there was parliamentary oversight regarding surveillance. The investigation will also include a series of recommendations to the UN General Assembly in 2014.

Edward Snowden’s revelation of the US and UK surveillance operations had left the world debating and had become one of the biggest controversies in modern times. The American Civil Liberties Union had called on the US administration to pipe down the surveillance activities of the country’s intelligence-gathering bodies.

Meanwhile, eight technology companies have sent an open letter to the US president Barack Obama regarding the need for sweeping reforms in surveillance laws as it will affect the trust developed by people towards new technology.