Hypocrisy is common. But Switzerland is a special case

[fpb]

I never did like the land of banks and... banks; tell me whether I have no reason. Everyone knows that Roman Polanski's conviction for child sex in 1978 was a scandal, arranged by a publicity-hungry, corrupt judge who connived with the prosecution in defiance of all law. Not that Polanski was an angel, but even prosecution lawyers have since admitted that the trial was what Bob Dylan would have called a "pig-circus", and that a much more lenient sentence would have been just. So when Polanski fled to France, the US authorities did not make any real effort to have him extradited. Everyone concerned with the trial was ashamed. Now, thirty-one years after the show-trial, the Swiss authorities, for reasons best known to themselves, have entrapped Polanski into visiting Switzerland for a cinema festival and arrested him on the 31-year-old warrant. I am no fan of men who have sex with minors, but this stinks. The Swiss would do better to arrest their own villains, like the filth who murders for hire in the so-called Dignity clinic. And let's not even get on their banking business.

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A few months after

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The American side have preferred - after months of worldwide publicity - to let Polansky go free rather than reveal in court the records of the negotiations with the judge in the original case. What do they have to hide that they would rather lose their case before the whole world than reveal?