9 - Uncommon Law: The Reach of British Justice

Summary

Among the core tenets of Britain’s much-vaunted ‘global reach’ was the belief in a shared tradition of British justice inherited from the Common Law. Though administered by way of separate judicial systems in widely disparate jurisdictions, the law nevertheless furnished a potent symbol of continuity through the force of shared judicial principles and procedures, joint-channels of appeal and a common source of legitimacy in the British Crown. In Rhodesia in the 1960s, this system was turned on its head when the increasingly isolated community of white settlers led by Ian Smith embarked on a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Legal axioms that could no longer be relied on to underwrite white authority were swiftly discarded in favour of a much cruder conception of ‘law and order’ founded on naked force. The long arm of British justice was caught embarrassingly short when the Wilson government failed to supress a rebellion of a few hundred thousand unrepentant white Rhodesians, whose agitation stemmed from the realization that they could no longer be British in their own terms. This chapter looks specifically at the furore over the Smith Government’s use of capital pubnishment against political prisoners, which came to symbolize broken allegiances and the eclipse of the common law as the sheet anchor of a global British justice.