In the country I grew up in, the Netherlands, not only is that not common practice, it cannot happen at all. What we have is people can ask the Ministry of Justice for a "Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag (VOG)", a declaration by the ministerial department that there are no relevant convictions that would get in the way of the job or role they are applying for. If you have no convictions, you get your VOG. If you have convictions but they are not relevant to the job or role you are applying for, you get the exact same VOG that you would if you have no convictions, so that there is no way for employers to know the difference. Your employer is not allowed to ask you directly about a criminal history (at least not in a job interview), they are only allowed to ask for a VOG. Yes, that means you can get a banking license with a criminal history, if the Ministry has decided that that criminal history is irrelevant. With a conviction for fraud, you won't get that license. With a conviction for assault, you might. That seems like a much fairer system to me and I wish more countries would adopt it.
I think the system in the Netherlands uses a lot more secrecy surrounding the courts systems. In those cases, secrecy is default.. SO having a bureaucratic branch dedicated to determining relevant convictions makes sense.
In the USA, came from the UK which was known (in the 1700's) for having secret trials, secret evidence, secret witnesses, and secret punishments. So the founders built this system to be transparent in many ways. And that meant public recording of crimes. Fast forward a few hundred years, and this computing thing takes off, and records everywhere are put in a system and easily searchable.
Having the secret system in place in the Netherlands and the transparent/easily searchable system in the USA don't really mix all to well.
(Admittedly, much of the courts systems are still opaque as mud, but some important parts are constitutional - like seeing/questioning witnesses, jury of your peers, etc)
Note that there is no secrecy during court proceedings in the Netherlands: court proceedings are ordinarily open to the public. There are exceptions for family affairs (such as divorces), tax affairs, and criminal cases against minors, but otherwise you are free to watch a court proceeding if you like. Source, in Dutch: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/rechtspraak-en-gesc... The only secrecy is after court proceedings, and even then, only as far as for the identities of the people are involved: court rulings are regularly published online at https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/, easily searchable, with just the names of people and identifying information redacted.
Two basic ideas come to mind. We want suspects not have their life destroyed if they are found not guilty. And after you have done your sentence, you should be free to have a normal life again.
For some people and some cases this is not possible. Sometimes there is a publicly known person involved, like the case of Keith Bakker which is in the Dutch news today. He has been a lot on TV in the past. Another case was the killing of Pim Fortuyn, a well-known politician, where everybody knows the name of the killer and he is now somewhat forced to live in another country. Mostly the news talk about Jos B. or similar semi-private namings. People closely involved know who it is about, but it doesn't need to be on TV or in the newspaper.
mpol already answered part of the design here about the need for privacy for the people involved; it is a balancing of priorities, both transparency in the judicial system and that privacy are important and this is a way of getting both.
About your other question though: one of the courts states in an answer to one of their frequently asked questions, https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati..., that a copy of a verdict will always be anonymised. No suggestions are made for when you want to apply for an exception to that rule and I suspect it is not possible at all. I am also struggling to come up with a valid reason for such a request; if it is indeed impossible, that might not be a problem.
How do they handle requests to view information about court cases currently in progress?
Example: I own and live in a condo apartment in a housing complex where the legal entities for my building and four other buildings are all members of one overall legal entity for the complex. Some of the other legal entities, and some of their administrators, are currently suing the overall legal entity with various claims. The management notified all owners that this was happening, as they're required by law to do, but didn't give the full complaint. (They did name the individuals and legal entities who filed suit, including the administrator roles of the individuals.) I'd like to read the full details.
Where I live, I can go to the public library or the courthouse, search for the involved parties in a database, and read the specifics. I don't have to prove that I am indirectly a partial owner of the entity being sued (though I am); this is available to the general public.
How would this work in the Netherlands if public access is anonymized?
I imagine the reason your laws only requires a notification that a court case is happening, without details, is because all the information is already public anyway and you can look up anything you need, so I expect that if Dutch law has similar provisions, it would require more details to be shared with you. However, this is just guessing, I have no experience with this, sorry.
Though in this case the transparency is one-sided: ICANN can gather all manner of information on Sunde, but Sunde is denied any detailed explanation from ICANN on exactly why his application was denied. Just this rather opaque reason of them being "not comfortable" with him operating a domain registrar.
It's worth noting that in the UK, an applicants car minal background could easily be checked but the application process is only allowed to ask if you have any "outstanding" issues. The idea being that crimes you have served your time for, and those that happened in the past are usually not relevant and can keep ex convicts in low paying / criminal work if used to stop them gaining legitimate work.
In addition to that, most criminal convictions have a limitation on how long they count towards your VOG. In most cases they look back 4 years, 2 for younger people (till 23) There are exceptions like in transport (taxi/truck) and high integrity functions like lawyers and interpreters (10 years) and people convicted of sex offences (10 years or longer depending on the function).
There's a similar bug with the age of consent laws where I live. General gist of things is that the age of consent is 17, however if both participants are under 17 and the age gap is small (typically less than 1 year), there's an exception clause (I believe this is known as a "Romeo & Juliet" clause).
This leads to the odd scenario where someone born 16y364d ago can get it on with someone born 16y363d ago, then the very next day it becomes illegal, and the day after that it becomes legal again.
I'm reminded of the way health concerns are handled for pilots. As I understand it, you get your medical from an authorized doctor, and that certifies that in health terms you're fit for the job. Different roles require different levels of medical certificate. With that done, your employer has no business prying further regarding your health.
There's a lot of information on that at https://www.justis.nl/producten/vog/beoordeling-besluit-en-b..., too much to summarise here, but I'll just mention what it says at the end: if you aren't given your VOG when you believe you should be, it's possible to ask for that decision to be reviewed. If upon review you still aren't given your VOG, you can appeal that decision by taking it to court and having a judge look at it.
And what kind of results do they get? (I'm genuinely asking)
Any time I hear about a "you can apply for X" series of bureaucratic hoops one can jump though I can't help but wonder if it's like getting a building permit in SF or a handgun license in NYC where only the people who've made the right donations to the right people can get what they want and everyone else gets the bureaucratic run around.
As I remember it you submit a web form, pay 25 euro, then it's sent to you or your employer. Either way everyone can get one, no special hoops or donations required.
Yes I do. A Judge decided what was a fair punishment for the offense. They sat through an entire trial and made a decision about what was an appropriate sentencing.
Once that appropriate sentence has been serve there should be no further punishment. If the Judge decides the felon should never be able to work in banking they can, in most countries, make that happen.
What's the point of having a judicial system if everyone is going to take the matter in their own hands anyway?
In Czechia, you can ask the court to erase your criminal record. They usually comply after the same amount of years that was your original sentence. Meaning that after spending 3 years in prison, the criminal record stays with you further 3 years and after that if there is no reason to keep it and you ask for it, it gets erased.
Well, erased is not really exact. It won't be accessible by anyone and you will have the right to be treated as if you were never convicted.
So, Peter's original sentence was like 8 months? After so many years I believe nobody should hold his TPB involvement against him anymore.
> You don't want to give banking license to a convicted felon.
Why not? "Convicted felon" encompasses a lot. Being convicted of felony drug possession when you were 19, for example, has very little to do with one's ability or trustworthiness to run a bank.
Sure, maybe we don't give banking licenses to people who have committed financial crimes (though a lot of corrupt investment bank executives seem to have no problem doing business), but that's not the same thing.
This idea that committing a crime should lock people out of many life activities is one of the things that leads them to committing more crimes. The punishment was a fine or jail time; let's stop punishing people for the rest of their lives.
This was also the ACB take on Second Amendment rights which you may remember from recent confirmation hearings: yes, we can let felons have guns, because a felony "includes everything from Kanter's offense, mail fraud, to selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts, redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan, and countless other state and federal offenses." Thus it's very poorly related to the risk levels involved. (DC vs Heller.)
Overreliance on the category "felon" also shows up in a recent Gorsuch take on the Fourth Amendment: "We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there's not an American alive who hasn't committed a felony in some—under some state law. And in a world like that, why doesn't it make sense to retreat back to the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which I'm going to oversimplify, but generally says that you get to go into a home without a warrant if the officer sees a violent action or something that's likely to lead to imminent violence… Why isn't that the right approach?
(Lange v. California)
Yep, if a felony wasn't violent, or perhaps not even gun-related, I don't see why felons shouldn't be able to own guns.
(I mean, I'm generally against the level of private gun ownership we have in the US, but given 2A, it seems like a violation to deny anyone their constitutional rights based on a broad label like "felon".)
In certain parts of the world. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn't try to ruin the whole lives of people who made a mistake and already paid for it by serving their time in prison (or whatever the court ruled).
I find the idea that a single crime you commited makes you somehow less of a human being incredibly backwards and brutal. Plus, it seems to be not very effective.
From what I read there are complex socio-economic reasons for the system to be shaped that way, but from an outsider perspective - so without caring about said reasons - it looks absolutely crazy.
So serving a prison sentence is not enough in this case? If someone is convicted of things like pirating, we should punish them permanently in random domains for the rest of their life? Gee, I wonder why recidivism rates are so high...
What is the point of the legal system if everyone is just going to apply extra-legal, -arbitrary- punishments on top of it?
Firstly, this ignores the fact that most crime occurs due to socioeconomic reasons. So you're kicking someone in the head after they're already down and have served a punishment doled out by a judge.
Secondly, obviously the -type- of crime should make things more difficult or impossible in certain cases. But arbitrarily punishing people for having any conviction at all is the opposite of what a healthy society should be doing. This thoroughly ensures that recidivism rates will remain high, because what's the point in trying to cooperate with a society that brands you as a criminal no matter what punishment you serve or what you do throughout the rest of your life?
We need to focus on rehabilitation, not continuing to punish people for the rest of their lives.
"That might not be fair, but that's how it is."
Sorry to be blunt, but hopefully this punitive attitude will die out as older people die out. This is one American attitude that I absolutely despise.
It seems strange that a state solely determines the boundary for a crime, solely enforces that boundary, solely executes the related punishment, and then suddenly everyone’s piling on.
If it’s the job of the state, it should be the job of the state.
> What is the point of the legal system if everyone is just going to apply extra-legal, -arbitrary- punishments on top of it?
To control the application of violence and to make sure the preexisting rules are being followed before it is applied.
If you don't have any verification that the rules are being followed, those in power tend to do pretty horrible things. At the same time, if those in power use no violence, the populace tend to resort to extra-legal violence to deliver what they see as justice, which results in a different class or horrible things happening (and threatens the government's monopoly on legitimized violence).
It's basically a local maximum that still kind of sucks, but works better than anything else we've tried at scale.
We've tried getting the government involved in social punishment, but it tends to work out very poorly and it seems best just to have them not enter that sphere.
> what's the point in trying to cooperate with a society that brands you as a criminal no matter
Potentially nothing, but that's a question for society, not for the government/legal system. Society is supposed to control the government, not the other way around (or at least that's the theory, practice is sometimes pretty spotty).
It should also be noted that there's no requirement for people to add these extra punishments. So, it should be pretty easy to turn around if people ever pull their heads out of their asses.
It doesn't have to be, though, and it's something that can be changed. And it must be, else the US will collapse under the weight of its own incarceration and injustice.
I'm not sure if you're advocating for the "way it is" but I hope not. The way it is isn't fair and the legal system, and society in general, should realize that and improve it.
> I'm not sure if you're aware, but this is a very US thing. In Europe it's not even uncommon with laws against discriminating on these grounds as well.
As (almost) always when "Europe" comes up in the comments of this site to oppose it with the USA: *Europe is not a thing* (as in: it is not an homogenous thing at all, it covers many different countries with many different situations, laws and everything).
At least in France, quite many jobs require a criminal record to be presented, to check that you were not sentenced for a crime/offence deemed incompatible with the specific position.
It is less invasive, and less public than in the USA, but it pretty well exists and is perfectly legal.
For security related jobs you need a clean criminal record n Greece/Cyprus but if you ask my opinion a criminal knows how criminals work and think so it would be an asset to have a criminal working (with devotion, not trolling) for a security company.
You say "you" but I have no particular complaints about letting someone who ran a Bittorrent tracker run a DNS registry. They committed a thought crime, not a murder. If their DNS registry is mismanaged, I can easily take my business elsewhere. What's next, you can't get a job because you got a parking ticket one time? Why would you let someone who can't read parking signs write software, after all?
I'd prefer to get some data on what the risk is here. Among criminals, how many commit their second crime while running a DNS registry? If we don't know, I am not sure it's rational to give someone a life sentence in that domain. It's just punitive, not intelligent risk management.
It’s also very common to misuse criminal justice systems to control dissidents, ethnic groups, women etc. A strategy beloved of bigots and reactionaries, authoritarians and totalitarians, from Mississippi to Moscow.
It's very uncommon in many parts of the world. In countries that aim to reform and educate criminals during their time behind bars, not giving them opportunities when they get out seems illogical.
Perhaps we can make this a little easier and more obvious for people?
How about when you’re convicted of an offense you have to wear a letter on your chest representing that offense? The shame and additional punishment should go on indefinitely long after the actual punishment has ended, right?
