Wajib ul Qatl - Capital Punishment in Islam

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"Wajib ul Qatl" refers to the concept of killing someone in Islamic jurisprudence. It is important to note that Islamic laws can vary based on interpretation and school of thought, and the application of such laws may differ as well. "Wajib ul Qatl" generally falls under the category of capital punishment for specific crimes in Islamic law.

Here are a few specific examples of historical and contemporary instances where the concept of "Wajib ul Qatl" or similar ideas have been applied, either by states or private individuals:

States:

1. Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islamic law known as Wahhabism or Salafism. The country has implemented capital punishment for a range of crimes, including murder and certain forms of drug trafficking, which some consider falling under the category of "Wajib ul Qatl." The government cites Sharia law as the basis for such punishments.

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3. Iran: In Iran, which follows the Twelver Shia branch of Islam, capital punishment is also applied for various crimes under the umbrella of Sharia law. Iran's penal code includes provisions for offenses such as murder, adultery, apostasy, and drug trafficking, which some interpretations might consider as "Wajib ul Qatl" under certain circumstances.

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5. Taliban Rule (Afghanistan): During their previous rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban implemented a strict form of Sharia law, which included public executions for offenses like murder and theft. While not exactly the concept of "Wajib ul Qatl," the severe penalties applied in their interpretation of Islamic law might be seen as a manifestation of such principles.

Private Individuals:

1. Assassinations for Blasphemy: There have been instances where individuals or groups have claimed to carry out killings based on their perception that someone has committed blasphemy against Islam. These cases often involve private individuals acting out of religious fervor and feeling a duty to enforce what they consider to be "Wajib ul Qatl" against those they deem to have insulted the religion.

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3. Honor Killings: In some cases, families or communities have resorted to violence, including murder, when they believe that an individual has brought dishonor to their family or community through actions that are seen as violating Islamic values. These acts are often justified using religious or cultural reasons, but they are not universally accepted within the Muslim community.

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5. Extremist Militant Groups: Some extremist groups, such as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), have carried out executions and killings of individuals they accuse of various offenses, including collaborating with opposing forces, apostasy, or violating their interpretation of Islamic law. These groups often use a distorted understanding of Islamic teachings to justify their actions.

It's important to emphasize that these examples vary widely in their interpretation and application of Islamic law, and they are not universally accepted within the broader Muslim community. Many Muslims and Islamic scholars reject such extreme interpretations and actions, emphasizing the importance of due process, justice, and avoiding vigilantism.

A Quick History of the BJP

 

Should the rich pay more for the same services – and higher fines too?

Patrick Collinson in The Guardian

The government is considering a sliding scale of probate fees, an idea that could apply elsewhere


 

In Finland, speeding fines are based on the offender’s income. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

There was outrage this week when the government said it was pressing ahead with a new approach to charging for its role in probate (the legal process for settling your financial affairs on death). Instead of the current £155 flat fee for the paperwork, the government is considering a sliding scale of probate fees based on the value of the estate, from zero to £6,000 – even though the cost of the paperwork is virtually the same.

The Law Society – representing the solicitors who do probate work – says it’s unfair. “The cost to the courts for providing a grant of probate does not change whether the size of the estate is £10,000 or £1m.” It argues that this is no longer a fee but a “stealth” increase in inheritance tax.

Much steeper inheritance taxes are perfectly fine, but this back-door attempt to raise IHT will strike even soak-the-rich types as a bit odd. What next? Should a homebuyer pay a higher fee for local authority searches depending on the sale price of the property? Should your TV licence be based on your income? Should you pay a bigger fine for not having a TV licence, if you have an above-average income?

Actually, on the last one, plenty of countries do go down that path. In Finland – to which we must now genuflect on all things progressive – there is a system called “day fines”. If you commit a misdemeanour that may result in a fine issued by a public authority – such as a speeding ticket – then the size of the penalty is based on the person’s income.

In 2015, a millionaire in Finland was hit with a €54,000 (£4,700) fine for speeding, while in 2002 a Nokia executive received a €116,000 fine for speeding on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, and in 2001 a driver was punished with a €35,300 fine for going through a red light.

Behind the idea of bigger fines for the rich is the fear that they can “purchase” the right to commit offences, because the relative cost to them is immaterial. Anybody who speeds, or evades their TV licence, or who goes through a red light, is equally blameworthy, but the richer person is less deterred from repeating the offence because the fine is relatively meaningless.

Of course, this is all about misdemeanours. Surely there’s no read-across to pure government services? But there is: your family might produce the same amount of rubbish as a similar family on the other side of town, but you are already effectively paying a much higher price (through your council tax) for it to be collected if you live in a pricier house.

There may be more merit in a sliding scale for probate fees than first thought – and a very good case for making speeding and other fines payable according to income.

In today's corporations the buck never stops. Welcome to the age of irresponsibility

Our largest companies have become so complex that no one's expected to fully know what's going on. Yet the rewards are bigger than ever

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 9 July 2013 21.30 BST

Hon Ha's Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, in 2010. That year there were 12 suicides in the 300,000-strong workforce. 'The top managers of Apple escaped blame because these deaths happened in ­factories in another country (China) owned by a company from yet another country (Hon Hai, the Taiwanese ­multinational).' Photograph: Qilai Shen

George Osborne confirmed on Monday that he would accept the recommendation of Britain's parliamentary commission on banking standards and add to his banking reform bill a new offence of "reckless misconduct in the management of a bank".

That is a bit of a setback for the managerial class, but it still does not sufficiently change the overall picture that it is a great time to be a top manager in the corporate world, especially in the US and Britain.

Not only do they give you a good salary and handsome bonus, but they are really understanding when you fail to live up to expectations. If they want to show you the door in the middle of your term, they will give you millions of dollars, even tens of millions, in "termination payment". Even if you have totally screwed up, the worst that can happen is that they take away your knighthood or make you give up, say, a third of your multimillion-pound pension pot.

Even better, the buck never stops at your desk. It usually stops at the lowest guy in the food chain – a rogue trader or some owner of a two-bit factory in Bangladesh. Occasionally you may have to blame your main supplier, but rarely your own company, and never yourself.

Welcome to the age of irresponsibility.

The largest companies today are so complex that top managers are not even expected to know fully what is really going on in them. These companies have also increasingly outsourced activities to multiple layers of subcontractors in supply chains crisscrossing the globe.

Increasing complexity not only lowers the quality of decisions, as it creates an information overload, but makes it more difficult to pin down responsibilities. A number of recent scandals have brought home this reality.

The multiple suicides of workers in Foxconn factories in China have revealed Victorian labour conditions down the supply chains for the most futuristic Apple products. But the top managers of Apple escaped blame because these deaths happened in factories in another country (China) owned by a company from yet another country (Hon Hai, the Taiwanese multinational).

No one at the top of the big supermarkets took serious responsibility in the horsemeat scandal because, it was accepted, they could not be expected to police supply chains running from Romania through the Netherlands, Cyprus and Luxembourg to France (and that is only one of several chains involved).

The problem is even more serious in the financial sector, which these days deals in assets that involve households (in the case of mortgages), companies and governments all over the world. On top of that these financial assets are combined, sliced and diced many times over, to produce highly complicated "derivative" products. The result is an exponential increase in complexity.

Andy Haldane, executive director of financial stability at the Bank of England, once pointed out that in order to fully understand a CDO2 – one of the more complicated financial derivatives (but not the most complicated) – a prospective investor needs to absorb more than a billion pages of information. I have come across bankers who confessed that they had derivative contracts running to a few hundred pages, which they naturally didn't have time to read.

Given this level of complexity, financial companies have come to rely heavily on countless others – stock analysts, financial journalists, credit-rating agencies, you name it – for information and, more importantly, making judgments. This means that when something goes wrong, they can always blame others: poor people in Florida who bought houses they cannot afford; "irresponsible" foreign governments; misleading foreign stock analysts; and, yes, incompetent credit-rating agencies.

The result is an economic system in which no one in "responsible" positions takes any serious responsibility. Unless radical action is taken, we will see many more financial crises and corporate scandals in the years to come.

The first thing we need is to modernise our sense of crime and punishment. Most of us still instinctively subscribe to the primeval notion of crime as a direct physical act – killing someone, stealing silver. But in the modern economy, with a complex division of labour, indirect non-physical acts can also seriously harm people. If misbehaving financiers and incompetent regulators cause an economic crisis, they can indirectly kill people by subjecting them to unemployment-related stress and by reducing public health expenditure, as shown by books like The Body Politic. We need to accept the seriousness of these "long-distance crimes" and strengthen punishments for them.

More importantly, we need to simplify our economic system so that responsibilities are easier to determine. This is not to say we have to go back to the days of small workshops owned by a single capitalist: increased complexity is inevitable if we are to increase productivity. However, much of the recent rise in complexity has been designed to make money for certain people, at the cost of social productivity. Such socially unproductive complexity needs to be reduced.

Financial derivatives are the most obvious examples. Given their potential to exponentially increase the complexity of the financial system – and thus the degree of irresponsibility within it – we should only allow such products when their creators can prove their productivity and safety, similar to how the drug approval process works.

The negative potential of outsourcing in non-financial industries may not be as great as that of financial derivatives, but the buying companies should be made far more accountable for making their subcontractors comply with rules regarding product safety, working conditions and environmental standards.

Without measures to simplify the system and recalibrate our sense of crime and punishment, the age of irresponsibility will destroy us all.

I'm an everythingist – craving new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in

Everythingism is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness – which explains why I haven't read Crime and Punishment

• 
• • Sophie Heawood
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013 18.30 BST

Crime and Punishment: details available on Wikipedia. Photograph: CBW/Alamy

When I was pregnant, someone told me that she read Dostoevsky novels to her baby, both in the womb and after he was born. Apparently, at about two months old, he would respond with delight every time he heard the character names he had heard so many times in utero.

Massively annoyed by this insufferable woman and her competitive wankery, I resolved to go home and do exactly the same thing. Only I had never read any Dostoevsky, and wasn't sure that I could be arsed, in my seventh month of gestation, to begin a literary journey into desperate horse-flogging Russians and Siberian internment camps. So I went straight to the Wikipedia page for Crime and Punishment and skipped to the list of character names instead.

"Raskolnikov! Svidrigailov! Dunechka!" I barked at my foetus for no discernible reason, the laptop balanced precariously on my bump, while my internal smugometer wavered somewhere between pride and existential despair. A little like the characters in the books. Perhaps.

It was some time after this that I took a long, soft look at my slapdash, half-arsed approach to life, and realised that I am an everythingist. This is a word I have invented to describe the sort of person who is greedy for the benefit of all new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in to fully commit to any of them. An everythingist leaves no experiential stone unturned, which means doing absolutely everything by halves. It is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness. It will get you nowhere in the end. Halfway there at best. Every time an everythingist's mother opens her mouth, the words "oh just bloody well get on with it" come out.

Here's how to tell if you, too, are an everythingist. Do you clutch your phone in your hand at all times, like a beacon against the cold, a magic talisman with its promise of otherness, betterness, of more attractive people desirous of your company elsewhere? Does it ensure you are unable to quite go with a plan or be in the moment because of all the other plans and moments where you might be, cheating on yourself with your other selves? Does your phone give you FOMO (AKA fear of missing out) for the party you're not at, even when you're at it? Did the news that Prism could be spying on all of our data give you a giddy rush when you thought that one of the lockdown powergeeks might be looking in and realising that you – you! – are the chosen one? Do you tend to fall asleep in your clothes, just in case the revolution should begin outside your bedroom window in the night?

Do you, like me, think that fairytale endings will magically happen to your life – ie, you will fall in deep rewarding love and raise daughters with Rapunzel hair in a beautiful Welsh farmhouse one day, writing novels on a typewriter, milking your nanny goats at dawn? Of course, this all will have to happen magically as you absolutely refuse to give up nightclubs and the closest you have come to milking your nanny goats at dawn was all a case of mistaken identity and that restraining order for going within a 40-metre ring of the late-night Turkish greengrocers is a gross infringement on your civil liberties, which you will sort out as soon as you find the bit of paper they wrote it on.

The everythingist can't be tied down by a job and so they work freelance (ie are self-unemployed). They don't want to be restricted by narrow labels like straight or gay because they believe their sexuality to be a fluid concept (i.e. they keep getting dumped). They are breathlessly addicted to their youth, despite being 12 years older than their parents were when they had them; can't read a book to the end because they've already started two more; and they need to know, at all times, that they could, in theory, if they wanted to, at any point, run away to Rio de Janeiro.

The everythingist works from home, revelling in their freedom to go for a walk in the sunshine while other sad jobsworthy losers are stuck at their desks with not so much as a freelancer's liedown to look forward to. The everythingist has been planning this walk in the sunshine for 17 days now, having been quite distracted by all the freelancer's liedowns that it is their right and freedom to enjoy. In their lunch hour. I mean, why not? It's not as if there's any lunch.

If you are not an everythingist, and you're one of those people who gets stuff done and gets over it – I realise now that you have the greatest freedom of all. The freedom to finish things, and not have all your half-read books, half-written books and half-experienced experiences clanking around your neck like shells. I can only apologise for how I used to giggle at you for being boring and keeping lists and being on time while I dashed over half an hour late to meet you, hopes and dreams blinding my eyes so that I couldn't read a bus timetable. I'm so sorry now. For everything.

Ministers who misuse statistics to mislead voters must pay the price

Politicians resign for fake expenses or receiving favours, but not for making false statements. They should be punished

• 
• • Peter Wilby
  • The Guardian, Friday 31 May 2013 20.30 BST

Andrew Dilnot, now head of the UK Statistics Authority, ‘exposed a Conservative party claim on numbers of people who dropped out of claiming incapacity benefit as a lie.’ Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Some years ago, I talked to Andrew Dilnot, then principal of an Oxford college, now head of the UK Statistics Authority. He picked up a copy of the Guardian front page, jabbed his finger at the figure $25bn, which was highlighted in a panel, and asked: "Is that a big number?" I looked at him blankly. He said newspapers, particularly upmarket ones, were full of numbers but, in many instances, neither journalists nor readers could explain their significance. "Numbers are just a particular class of words. There isn't any other class of words in a paper that we wouldn't ask ourselves what they mean."

We often hear politicians quoting numbers, but what do they mean? In March, a Conservative party press release, faithfully reported in the Sunday Telegraph, claimed "nearly a million people" had come off incapacity benefit rather than face new medical tests for what is now called the employment and support allowance. The press release intended us to think 1m was a big number – "more than a third of the total", it stated – though the true figure was 878,300. To explain the meaning, it quoted the party chairman, Grant Shapps. The figure was a vindication of the government's stricter policies on benefit claimants, he said, and a demonstration of "how the welfare system was broken under Labour". It showed, we were supposed to deduce, the scale of malingering before the coalition put a stop to it.

But the big number was – there is no other word for it – a lie. Dilnot, now responsible for protecting the integrity of official statistics, exposed it as a lie this week, albeit using mild Whitehall language in letters to Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary. The 878,300 alleged malingerers had never received incapacity benefit. They were new claimants, aggregated over three-and-a-half years. Many (probably most) withdrew their claim because they recovered from their condition or found a new job. In 2011-12, out of 603,600 established benefit claimants referred for the new medical tests, just 19,700 (3.3%) withdrew before taking them. That figure – which most of us would think small – represented the true scale of people pretending to be sick.

This is not the first time Dilnot has issued reprimands for misuse of numbers or, to put it more bluntly than he would, the quotation of bogus figures. The prime minister himself was rebuked in January for stating that the coalition was "paying down Britain's debts"when the national debt had risen from £811bn to £1.1 trillion. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, was told in December to withdraw his claim that NHS spending had risen in real terms "in each of the last two years". Last month Duncan Smith was on the naughty step for claiming that, as a result of the new benefits cap, 8,000 people had moved into jobs. This was "unsupported" by official statistics, Dilnot ruled. Last year Michael Gove, the education secretary, was criticised for claims that, under Labour, tests had shown British children falling steeply in international league tables. UK samples for tests in 2000 and 2003 were inadequate, Dilnot wrote; it was not therefore possible to make "trend comparisons" with later tests in 2006 and 2009.

Politicians – like journalists, campaigners and even academics – habitually quote figures selectively, seizing on those that support their case, ignoring those that don't. That is human nature. We cannot expect ministers to examine all available evidence dispassionately every time they speak or write. No doubt they also make genuine errors, misunderstanding, misreading or failing to check statistics.

But the examples above are surely deliberate attempts to mislead the public. It is not a matter of accurate figures being taken out of context, but of making false statements about what official statistics show. (Labour may have been equally guilty of such behaviour, but it was rarely properly highlighted because the UK Statistics Authority was not established until 2008 and Dilnot did not take charge until last year.) Unfortunately, there is no price to pay. The "nearly a million" figure will stick in the public mind. Dilnot's demolition of the Shapps claim was not widely or prominently reported.

The quotation of statistics is fundamental to modern political debate. Parties compete, not so much on ideology or even policy, as on their competence to manage the nation's affairs. Most voters would struggle to distinguish between a Labour NHS reform and a Tory NHS reform, a Labour academy and a Tory academy, a Labour "crackdown" on benefits and a Tory "crackdown". They look for evidence that things are going well and politicians respond by quoting hospital waiting times, GCSE success rates, numbers coming off benefit, and so on. We know politicians cherry-pick the figures, wrench them out of context, round them up or down, but we should at least have confidence that they aren't making them up.

Perhaps, as is often suggested, better maths and statistics teaching in schools would help us make more sense of the figures. But we cannot all be expected to scrutinise the raw official statistics to verify everything we are told, not least because the Office for National Statistics website is virtually unnavigable. Without some faith in ministers' veracity, public trust in democracy withers still further.

Can anything be done? The public administration select committee has proposed that Dilnot take greater control over the collation and publication of departmental statistics, and over how they are publicised. It has also suggested that ministers should not have automatic access to official figures before they are released, because it allows them to put out their own "spin" in advance. These changes would be an improvement, but ministers will continue to offend until they have reason to fear the consequences of making false statements.

Nearly all ministerial resignations are connected with not telling the truth: submitting false expenses, covering up a speeding points swap, receiving favours from lobbyists. But telling untruths about official figures is somehow regarded less seriously. Dilnot should have the power, in the worst examples, to require a full Commons censure debate on a minister's conduct – with an expectation that, if he or she failed to offer an adequate defence or show contrition, resignation would follow. That would guarantee press attention and ministerial trembling. Big lies about big numbers require big deterrents.

The hangman’s justice

 

For many years now, The Hindu has opposed the death penalty on principle — often in the face of intense public disapproval. We oppose it for ordinary killers and mass murderers, communal pogromists as well as terrorists like Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab. Ever since that traumatic night we now denote by the veiled abbreviation 26/11, Kasab has justifiably been the face of evil for millions of Indians. He took part in a monstrous plot against the people of India and Mumbai, killed innocent people with abandon, and showed no remorse for his actions. It is no surprise, therefore, that his execution Wednesday morning has been greeted with approval across the country. No loss of human life, however despicable the individual might have been, ought to be a reason for celebration. Instead, this should be a time of national reflection: reflection about crime, about punishment and about that cherished bedrock of our republic, justice. For several reasons, the hanging of Kasab is at most a crude approximation of this quality, more closely resembling an act of vengeance. Kasab was neither the architect of 26/11 nor its strategic mastermind; the men who indoctrinated and controlled him remain safe in Pakistan, where most will likely never see the inside of a courtroom. The haste to hang Kasab makes even less sense when others guilty of hideous terrorist crimes have secured deferment of their sentences because political lobbies acted on their behalf — among them, the assassins of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Chief Minister Beant Singh of Punjab. It is also a sobering fact that criminals responsible for claiming more Indian lives than Kasab did — among them, the perpetrators of countless communal riots — live as free men. Not one of these things excuse or mitigate Kasab’s crime. But they do make it imperative to ask: is the hangman’s justice the only kind we can conceive of? 

The arguments against the death penalty are well known. There are pragmatic ones — in this case, that Kasab could have provided valuable testimony in future trials of yet-to-be-arrested 26/11 perpetrators. There are moral and technical ones; even in the United States, with its highly-functional criminal justice system, new forensic techniques have shown dozens of innocent men were executed, though this argument does not apply to Kasab whose guilt is proven well beyond even unreasonable doubt. The most compelling argument, however, is this: the application of the death penalty is, as the Supreme Court itself acknowledged earlier this week, increasingly arbitrary. Capital punishment has become, as the medieval philosopher Maimonides many centuries ago warned it would, a matter of “the judge’s caprice”. It is also simply not true that capital punishment is integral to fighting terrorists. The absence of the death penalty in, say, France and the United Kingdom has not made these two nations softer in their ability to combat terror than the U.S. The grief of 26/11 was personal for many in this newspaper; like others, members of staff grieve for lost friends. Yet, the horror of 26/11 ought not stop us from dispassionately debating the need for the death penalty.

Auditors must be held to account

The shareholder spring is the perfect time to challenge the poor performance of unscrutinised accountancy firms

• 
• • Prem Sikka
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 May 2012 15.04 BST

'KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and Ernst & Young, collectively known as the Big Four accountancy firms, audit around 99% of FTSE 100 companies.' Photograph: Action Press / Rex Features

Shareholder spring is in the air, with increasing numbers voting against fat-cat executive rewards for failure and mediocre performance. However, the same scrutiny is not being applied to the business advisers and consultants implicated in headline failures. They continue to receive huge financial rewards. Company auditors are good example.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young, collectively known as the Big Four accountancy firms, audit around 99% of FTSE 100 companies. These firms audited all distressed banks. At the height of the banking crisis they gave the customary clean bill of health to Northern Rock, Abbey National, Alliance and Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went bust shortly after receiving the all-clear. A subsequent inquiry by the House of Lords economic affairs committee accused auditors of "dereliction of duty" (para 161) and "complacency" (para 167) and basking in a culture of "box ticking" (para 6) rather than delivering meaningful audits. Despite the damning criticisms, some partners in audit firms still charge over £700 an hour for their services.

In 2011, Barclays, the bank that forced the government to introduce retrospective legislation to combat its tax avoidance schemes, paid £54m to its auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers, including £15m for consultancy and advice on tax matters. PricewaterhouseCoopers, which once audited Northern Rock, collected another £48m from Lloyds Banking Group , including £10m for consultancy. HSBC has paid a whopping £56m, including about £8m for tax and consultancy services to its auditors KPMG, the firm that audited HBOS and Bradford & Bingley. RBS has paid £41m, including £7.4m for consultancy to Deloitte, the firm that audited Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and Bear Stearns. Ernst & Young, the firm that audited Lehman Brothers, earned £36m in audit and consultancy fees from BP and another £28.5m from Aviva. At major companies, the fees paid to accountancy firms are larger than CEO salaries, but rarely attract sustained media attention. The auditor dependency on companies for vast fees neuters any impulse to deliver an independent opinion on company accounts. No one at any accountancy firm is ever promoted for blowing the whistle on dubious practices of companies and losing a client.

At company AGMs auditors are appointed often without any discussion. The resolutions on auditor appointment are not accompanied by any information on the composition of the audit teams; time spent on the job, audit and consultancy contracts, information obtained from directors, list of faults found with company accounts, regulatory action against auditors or anything else that might shed light on the quality of audit work or conflict of interests. With weak accountability measures, auditors deliver little of any social value.

The charges of "dereliction of duty" and "complacency" have not led to any worthwhile UK reforms though there is plenty of spin about encouraging auditors to be sceptical and tweaking auditing standards. There is no scrutiny of the basic auditing model which requires entrepreneurial accountancy firms to somehow invigilate giant corporations. The success of auditors is measured by private profits and they have no obligations to the state, or the public, which eventually bears the cost of bailouts and fraud. This mutual back-scratching has been a key factor in the debacles at Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers and the banking crash. Yet no real change is in sight.

The EU is proposing minimalist reforms to check the collusive relationship between auditors and companies. These include a ban on the sale of lucrative consultancy services to audit clients and forcing companies to regularly change their auditors. At present, FTSE 100 companies change auditors every 48 years on average. Inevitably, major firms are using their financial and political resources to oppose even these modest proposals.

Major accountancy firms have got used to collecting mega fees for failure and mediocre performance. Shareholders should check that by turning the spotlight on them and demand refunds for poor performance. The government should sharpen liability laws so that auditors are forced to make good the damage done by their silence.

The dirty war on WikiLeaks

Media smears suggest Swedish complicity in a Washington-driven push to punish Julian Assange

• 
• • John Pilger
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 March 2012 21.00 GMT

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, arriving for an extradition hearing at the high court in London on 2 November 2011. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers' and viewers' consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.

To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it. Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks' founder and editor Julian Assange.

Assange will soon know if the supreme court in London is to allow his appeal against extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual misconduct, most of which were dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm. On bail for 16 months, tagged and effectively under house arrest, he has been charged with nothing. His "crime" has been an epic form of investigative journalism: revealing to millions of people the lies and machinations of their politicians and officials and the barbarism of criminal war conducted in their name.

For this, as the American historian William Blum points out, "dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for [his] execution or assassination". If he is passed from Sweden to the US, an orange jumpsuit, shackles and a fabricated indictment await him. And there go all who dare challenge rogue America.

In Britain, Assange's trial by media has been a campaign of character assassination, often cowardly and inhuman, reeking of jealousy of the courageous outsider, while books of perfidious hearsay have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or resuscitated on the assumption that he is too poor to sue. In Sweden this trial by media has become, according to one observer there, "a full-on mobbing campaign with the victim denied a voice". For more than 18 months, the salacious Expressen, Sweden's equivalent of the Sun, has been fed the ingredients of a smear by Stockholm police.

Expressen is the megaphone of the Swedish right, including the Conservative party, which dominates the governing coalition. Its latest "scoop" is an unsubstantiated story about "the great WikiLeaks war against Sweden". On 6 March Expressen claimed, with no evidence, that WikiLeaks was running a conspiracy against Sweden and its foreign minister Carl Bildt. The political pique is understandable. In a 2009 US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the Swedish elite's vaunted reputation for neutrality is exposed as sham. (Cable title: "Sweden puts neutrality in the Dustbin of History.") Another US diplomatic cable reveals that "the extent of [Sweden's military and intelligence] co-operation [with Nato] is not widely known", and unless kept secret "would open up the government to domestic criticism".

Swedish foreign policy is largely controlled by Bildt, whose obeisance to the US goes back to his defence of the Vietnam war and includes his leading role in George W Bush's Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He retains close ties to Republican party extreme rightwing figures such as the disgraced Bush spin doctor, Karl Rove. It is known that his government has "informally" discussed Assange's future with Washington, which has made its position clear. A secret Pentagon document describes US intelligence plans to destroy WikiLeaks' "centre of gravity" with "threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution".

In much of the Swedish media, proper journalistic scepticism about the allegations against Assange is overwhelmed by a defensive jingoism, as if the nation's honour is defiled by revelations about dodgy coppers and politicians, a universal breed. On Swedish public TV "experts" debate not the country's deepening militarist state and its service to Nato and Washington, but the state of Assange's mind and his "paranoia". A headline in Tuesday's Aftonbladet declared: "Assange's moral collapse". The article suggests Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged source, may not be sane, and attacks Assange for not protecting Manning from himself. What was not mentioned was that the source was anonymous, that no connection has been demonstrated between Assange and Manning, and that Aftonbladet, WikiLeaks' Swedish partner, had published the same leaks undeterred.

Ironically, this circus has performed under cover of some of the world's most enlightened laws protecting journalists, which attracted Assange to Sweden in 2010 to establish a base for WikiLeaks. Should his extradition be allowed, and with Damocles swords of malice and a vengeful Washington hanging over his head, who will protect him and provide the justice to which we all have a right?

Abolish The Death Penalty in Cricket; I Mean the LBW

by Giffenman

In modern times many societies have abolished the death penalty as a form of punishment even for the most heinous crimes. One reason is that the judicial process is based on convincing a jury that such a crime was committed. Therefore one could say that a jury’s verdict is an opinion about an event and not a fact. I’d like to suggest that an LBW decision in cricket is the death penalty for a batsman and like the judicial process is based on opinion and not on fact. Hence it should be abolished.

When an appeal of LBW is made the umpire has to determine ‘whether the ball would have gone to hit the stumps if its progress had not been impeded by the batsman’s leg’. This is a point of opinion and not a point of fact.

Even in modern times where the form of pre-emptive justice is proving increasingly popular, no ‘suspected terrorist’ is given the death penalty because s/he may have been plotting a crime. The reason being that a crime has not been actually committed. Thus juries are loath to condemn such individuals to the gallows.

Similarly in the case of an LBW decision, since the ball has not hit the stumps there is no way one can be sure that the ball would have hit the stumps if unimpeded. It may have hit the stumps 99% of the time but there is no way of being sure. Hence a batsman in my view should not be declared out since that is akin to awarding the death penalty for a crime not committed.

Those opposed to this idea will immediately say removal of the LBW decision will be an incentive to batsmen to use their legs to prevent the ball from hitting the stumps. My suggestion is that every time the batsmen is found LBW in the opinion of the umpire and the DRS then he should be docked 25 runs. But a death penalty, i.e. an LBW, is too harsh a punishment for an event that has not occurred.