In 2003, sprinter Dwain Chambers was caught taking the banned steroid THG. He served a two-year ban, and has now turned informer to the anti-doping authorities and returned to the track. Earlier this week he ran the fastest 100m by a British athlete this year, and he intends to win a place on the British Olympic team at the trials just over a week from now. He looks to have a great chance.

The problem is that the British Olympic Association (BOA) has a policy of not selecting athletes that have failed drug tests, whether they’ve served their bans or not. No matter how well Chambers does in the trials, the BOA won’t pick him unless they’re forced to.

Chambers will challenge the legality of this policy in court, arguing that it constitutes an illegal restraint of trade. He hopes to get a ruling from the court saying that the BOA have to pick him if he does well enough at the trials.

In response to Chambers’ challenge, the British Athletes’ Commission (BAC) has taken up a petition calling for the selection policy to stay in place. Over a hundred athletes have signed, including big names such as Steve Redgrave and Kelly Holmes. The BAC’s Peter Gardner explained, “The petition carries weight because it has support from many athletes.”

He’s wrong. The petition doesn’t carry much weight at all.

The question here concerns a point of law: Does the BOA’s policy of not selecting athletes that have failed drug tests constitute an illegal restraint of trade? The petition only tells us that certain people approve of the BOA policy; it doesn’t tell us anything about whether it is legal or not. The policy may be popular, perhaps even have near unanimous support among athletes, but still break the law. This appeal to popularity shouldn’t persuade the court.

The presence of big names on the list doesn’t change this. Holmes and Redgrave have plenty of Olympic gold medals between them, but being a faster runner or rower than anyone else doesn’t give you much insight into employment law. To suggest that Chambers’ ban should be upheld because some great British Olympians say so would be an inappropriate appeal to authority.

I sympathise with the athletes that have signed the petition: I hope that the selection policy is legal and can be maintained. But the petition itself isn’t evidence that should sway the court.

In 2004, the Hunting Act was passed to make hunting with dogs (particularly fox hunting) illegal. In 2004-2006, there were 14 prosecutions under the act. But does the number of prosecutions reflect the number of offences that have been committed? Is the law being enforced?

Tory MP Anne Widdecombe argues that it isn’t, that the law is routinely broken and that more needs to be done to police it. She recognises that police resources are stretched, and so her proposed solution is to license and protect hunt monitors, members of the public who film hunts to collect video evidence of offences.

Without considering the specifics of any particular alleged breach of the law, we can see why the general context of hunts makes it difficult to discover whether an offence has been committed.

First, there are difficulties in collecting evidence. Hunts are fast-paced, and take place over a wide area on an improvised route, making them very difficult to observe. The fact that hunts go into wild areas, away from people, also reduces the number of incidental witnesses to them.

Second, many witnesses are likely to have reasons to distort the truth about what happened on a hunt. Those on the hunt (and the landowners) will want to avoid prosecution for any offences committed, so may lie about their actions. Hunt monitors tend to be opposed to hunting, looking for ways to incriminate the hunt, which means that their evidence must be treated with extreme caution. Add in the financial interests that locals have in the hunts continuing, and reports of hunters intimidating witnesses, and there will be concerns about the credibility of most of the witnesses to a hunt. 

Third, interpreting the evidence can be difficult. The law is complex and technical. Whether an offence has been committed can turn on such details as the number of dogs, what the dogs are being used for, why the animal is being hunted, or whether it is harmed. In some cases, understanding whether the law has been broken will take legal expertise that many observers lack.

All of these things make it difficult to be sure of just how many hunting offences are being committed. They also go some way to explaining why offences that are committed may go unprosecuted. If we want to see the Hunting Act enforced, then the challenge is to find a way of collecting evidence that addresses these problems.

Robert Mugabe became President of Zimbabwe in 1980. He was then a popular hero, having fought to liberate the country from white minority rule under the Rhodesian Front.

Mugabe’s time as President has seen the ruin of the country. His government has been criticised as riddled with corruption, and with high unemployment and runaway inflation Zimbabwe is now suffering financial disaster. There have also been reports of frequent attacks on his political opponents as he seeks to cling to power, including the use of wide-spread intimidation and of torture, and he is accused of having stolen the last election.

Five weeks ago, there was a Presidential election, and a real hope that Mugabe might be ousted. Things in Zimbabwe have become so bad that it seemed possible that Mugabe would no longer be able to control the opposition to him.

Following the election, Mugabe’s rival Morgan Tsvangirai quickly claimed outright victory. He didn’t have direct access to the ballots, but as a measure to promote fairness polling stations had been required to post local results, and Tsvangirai’s MDC party said that according to these results he had won 50.3% of the vote, more than the 50% required to make him the new President.

Meanwhile, Mugabe’s Zanu PF party refused to publish the results, amidst claims that they were looking for ways to rig them.

Today, finally, the official results were announced, giving Tsvangirai a win but not a large enough share of the vote to avoid a second round of voting with just him and Mugabe on the ballot paper. Whether or not Tsvangirai really won the vote outright is a mystery.

Both parties have some access to the results (ability to see), Tsvangirai’s to those posted outside the polling stations and Mugabe’s to the actual ballots cast, which makes them more credible.

Both have a clear vested interest to lie about the results in order to snatch power, however, damaging their credibility.

Although Mugabe’s reputation for rigging elections gives him the least credibility, without a neutral observer able to operate unhindered by Zanu PF it pretty much impossible for us to know what the outcome of the election really was.