The French apparently regard the sight of a powerful politician in handcuffs to be more shocking than the possibility that an African immigrant chambermaid was imprisoned and sexually assaulted. That’s cultural variation for you.
As my colleague Ben Brogan points out there may be some legitimate grounds in French legal terms for national outrage over Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s apparently ignominious treatment by the New York sex crimes police and the courts. There may even be sound arguments for those who are accused but not yet convicted being protected from media exposure as they are in France. But the initial uproar in the French media which implied that Mr Strauss-Kahn was being subjected to a peculiarly humiliating ordeal by being forced to appear in handcuffs under in the full gaze of the cameras really misses the point of America’s robustly open society.
The US does not like secrets. Its political culture takes as a basic premise that nothing should take place out of the public view except the most critical life-or-death security matters. Unlike Britain, it has no sub judice laws which ban the open discussion of criminal trials before they are resolved. Its libel legislation is – by British standards – minimal. And it certainly has no privacy law of the kind that has protected the great and powerful in France for generations. Americans believe that ordinary people they have a right to know what only the established and powerful would expect to know in the Old European societies. Indeed, this right (sometimes called “freedom of information”) which is enshrined in law is considered to be one of the fundamental attributes of a free and equal society.
Mr Strauss-Kahn was not being singled out for degradation: he was just being treated like any American suspect in any criminal case. Fans of the US television series “Law and Order: Special Victimes Unit” will have recognised the drill: famous and self-important person is unceremoniously arrested and frog-marched off the scene in the presence of his shocked colleagues and underlings. If we can all just get that straight, perhaps we can focus on the truly scandalous thing which may (or may not) have happened in that Manhattan hotel room.
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