A judge in Illinois wants to create special courts specifically for fathers. Judge Robert Spence claims these courts can somehow collect more child support from fathers whose children it has taken away.

In Staten Island this week, a new "integrated domestic violence" court will debut. The purpose of these courts, says Chief Judge Judith Kaye, is not to dispense justice but to "make batterers and abusers take responsibility for their actions." In other words, to find fathers guilty.

Special courts to try special crimes, that can only be committed by some people, are long familiar as a device to circumvent established standards of justice and implement ideological justice: revolutionary justice or socialist justice or gender justice. Special courts created during the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror and were consciously imitated in the Soviet Union. Hitler created the dreaded Volksgerichte or "people’s courts" described by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in their classic study of totalitarianism, as tribunals "in which only expediency in terms of National Socialist standards served as a basis for judgment."

Canada is already creating special domestic violence courts that can seize the property, including the homes, of men accused of domestic violence, even though the men are not convicted or even formally charged. Moreover, they may do so without the men being present to defend themselves. "This bill is classic police-state legislation and violates just about every constitutional principle," writes Robert Martin, of Western Ontario University.

Walter Fox, a Toronto lawyer, describes these courts as "pre-fascist."

As Dave Brown writes in the Ottawa Citizen, "Domestic violence courts . . . are designed to get around the protections of the Criminal Code. The burden of proof is reduced or removed, and there's no presumption of innocence."

Proposals have been mooted in the Justice Department to create similar tribunals in the United States.

But most astounding of all, new legislation in Britain will allow to the government to consider men guilty of domestic violence, even after they have been acquitted in court. I'm not making this up: Men found "not guilty" are to be issued with restraining orders and treated as if they are guilty. As Melanie Phillips writes in the Daily Mail, "This measure will destroy the very concept of innocence itself."

Countries that have upheld the Common Law traditions of freedom and justice are now rapidly dismantling them. How much authority do we have to create the institutions of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan when we are destroying them at home?

Stephen Baskerville