UR TV CAST

Eighty-three years ago, three shepherd children from the Portuguese village of Fatima saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, who revealed three secrets. The first two secrets apparently referred to the end of the First World War and to the danger that Communists would dominate the world. For years, the third secret was kept under lock and key, allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. It has now been published by the Vatican, and it is said to refer to the assassination attempt on the Pope in May 1981

Visions and secrets: they’re not what they used to be. Eighty-three years ago, three shepherd children from the Portuguese village of Fatima saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, who revealed three secrets. The first two secrets apparently referred to the end of the First World War and to the danger that Communists would dominate the world.

For years, the third secret was kept under lock and key, allowing conspiracy theories to flourish. It has now been published by the Vatican, and it is said to refer to the assassination attempt on the Pope in May 1981.
And yet, the mild sceptic – believer or otherwise – could be forgiven for noting that the text does not entirely correspond to the event in 1981 that it allegedly foretells: the secret reckons that the bishop in white will be killed by “a group of soldiers” firing bullets and arrows “on a mountaintop”; many other bishops and priests and others will also be killed. In fact the Pope was not killed, by a not-group of not-soldiers in a city square; nobody else was hurt. Not what you might call a perfect fit.Admittedly, even the Vatican was quick to insist yesterday that “no great mystery is unveiled”. Or, in the words of a famously laconic headline: “The Pope: no news”.. The Home Secretary has put forward proposals for compulsory detention, in the interests of protecting the public, of those who have the diagnosis of severe antisocial personality disorder, and who are also predicted by psychiatrists to be dangerous.

In the debate over this proposal, very important values are at stake on both sides. On the one hand, there is an obvious breach of civil liberties. Most of us prefer to live in a society where being locked up results from being convicted in court of a crime, rather than from the fact that someone predicts we are likely to commit a crime. On the other hand, as the Home Secretary has pointed out, our civil liberties also include not being attacked, raped or murdered. The Home Secretary has put forward proposals for compulsory detention, in the interests of protecting the public, of those who have the diagnosis of severe antisocial personality disorder, and who are also predicted by psychiatrists to be dangerous. In the debate over this proposal, very important values are at stake on both sides.

On the one hand, there is an obvious breach of civil liberties. Most of us prefer to live in a society where being locked up results from being convicted in court of a crime, rather than from the fact that someone predicts we are likely to commit a crime. On the other hand, as the Home Secretary has pointed out, our civil liberties also include not being attacked, raped or murdered.
The principle that people should not be deprived of liberty unless they have been convicted in a court of a crime is central to our civil liberties. But there are what are generally held to be justifiable exceptions. There is the power of the police to detain someone for questioning, acceptable only because there is a clear time-limit to this power. There is the power of a court to remand someone in custody, acceptable because it applies only pending a trial There are more serious exceptions than these temporary ones. There is the possibility of compulsorily detaining someone to prevent the spread of a serious infectious disease.

And there are the powers to “section” someone, to detain them in a psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act.The Mental Health Act allows the detention of people in hospital under certain conditions Simply having a mental disorder is not enough. The detention has to be either in the interests of their own health or safety or else intended to protect others. And there is a further condition: the detention has to be necessary for treatment (defined in terms of either alleviating the disorder or stopping it from deteriorating). This last condition, the “treatability test”, is the central feature which marks off the present law from the new proposals.Without the treatability test, the present law would provide what the Government hopes for. It would allow people to be detained because of their psychopathic disorder, where this was intended for the protection of others.To many, it seems obvious that dropping the treatability test is justified. Those who support the new proposals think that predictions of dangerousness would be right about two- thirds of the time.