PROPORTIONALITY.
He winked at her as he left the courtroom.
A small wink. After all that. After following three women through their own city, after following one of them all the way into a toilet and forcing from her at knifepoint what no one has the right to take, he still found the surplus to send her a wink on his way out of the courtroom.
It was not remorse, and it was not fear. It was more a kind of ownership, as if he still had something of hers with him.
I have watched and written about these kinds of judgments before. About the calculations where two things are placed side by side that cannot be measured in the same unit.
This is another one of them.
The district court did its calculation. Eight years. And then six years during which he may not enter the country. And then he may again. The entire case was settled in years. Neatly. In the way one settles things when one expects them to pass.
But there is nothing about what he did that passes.
She does not get eight years.
She gets the rest of her life.
And when one looks properly, that is where it skews. Everything the system does to him is written in a time that runs out. Eight years runs out. Six years runs out. In the end he stands there again and can set his feet on the same ground she lives on. It is not the size of the punishment that is wrong. It is that it is a size at all. A number counting down, held up against something that never counts down.
For that is where proportionality actually belongs. Not in harshness for harshness's sake, but in the irreparable. The only thing that matches something that cannot be undone is something else that cannot be undone.
She can never take that day back. The least a country can do is ensure that he can never take his expulsion back. He transgressed against what is inviolable in her, against Beauty and Innocence, and the answer to that is not to settle it in years, but to ensure that she never again has to share a country with him.
That is it. And that is all of it.
And yet there is still what lies beneath. For why is it actually only six years, and not forever?
I will tell you.
It is not because the judges are soft. They reached the edge of what they are allowed. The "forever" she needs is already forbidden, by a human rights article, by some EU rules, by an agreement with Turkey, by a language NO ONE in this country ever voted on.
The leniency is not a choice anyone made while looking her in the eyes. It was written long before she was followed down that platform.
And that is what I cannot let go.
Why on earth mercy is the only language we have for this kind of thing. Why it is such that when we finally agree that something is monstrous, we can still only answer it in measured quantities that expire?
Everything we do to him has an end.
What he did never will.
❤️🔥🪽
....
And in addition.
He has appealed the case. Dishonourable as he is. I would gladly see the High Court remember who we are here in this country. And sentence him even harder - and preferably without regard to what foolish supranational rules bind us in servitude.
