What the boss says goes. Judges must either resign or knuckle under. If you think this sound like the Divine Right of Kings, which was overthrown in this country only after a civil war, well the same thought has struck Blake. Geoffrey Robertson, who will be fighting Blake on behalf of Amnesty and the Fijian Human Rights Commission, will point out Bodin's other great contribution to jurisprudence came in his Demonomanie of 1580, which recommended that evidential technicalities should not stop the execution of witches. Unsurprisingly, historians cite Bodin as the intellectual ancestor of the lawyers who justified the witch-finders and absolutists in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia.
All civilised societies keep crown, church and state under the law.
The Human Rights Act, from which the Matrix barristers are profiting, is quite explicit on the need to be resolute on this point. The Act is a small part of a global movement to ensure that the world's greatest criminals do not escape justice. The arrest of Pinochet, the indictments against Bosnia's ethnic cleansers and the creation of an international court to try war criminals are among the few reasons to be cheerful about the future. I asked Nick Martin, the chief executive of Matrix, how he could explain his colleague's support for the Fijian military. I pointed out that the attorney general was a tool of the military.