Hi peter,

>Don't agree. Same in Dutch language and culture. You may be right that (Dutch) judges want more proof than 'hey, you black rat' in order to convict someone. But maybe that's one of the reasons why so many citizens feel there's a big gap between the population and the courts.

Well the problem is that people have different ideas of what discrimination is (at least I seem to have a different definition), so there is confusion. In order to agree upon what is discrimination there have to be some rules describing discrimination.

I simply can't imagine subjective rules where historical suppression, type of ethnicity, cultural aspects beeing part of the pure definition, because it is impossible to have a uniform conclusion do to interpretation differences. As stated by thomasW, it seems more have to do with hyper-sensitivity rather than rational thinking.

Therefore I simply disagree with your suggestion that many citizens feel there is a big gap between population and the court. We have a court for a very good reason. Kees B., would be dead if we did not have one, while after 4 years we know he is innocent.

The majority of the population has no idea about our juridical system and reacts in reflexes and emotions, but that is simply not the way you can practise justice. It has to be rational or else it is not defendable. We can disagree with the lenght of detention the punishment, the security of TBS people, but all in the end we do not have a clue what we are talking about. We have to leave that up to the court.

Walter,