Comment by chii
18 hours ago
> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
for civil disputes, i am sure they are.
For disputes between the gov't and you, i highly doubt it. Is there a single instance of the gov't being sued for a policy that was meant to be political in nature affecting the supplicant?
Even someone like jack ma is unable to use the courts to obtain any justice - his Ant Financials IPO was shut down for political reasons, and he was reeducated. There's no such thing as due process in china.
This is such a myopic comment to me.
Name me a single country where a rich person goes against the government and wins? You just don’t see it happen much in the US because the government is run by rich capitalists, but pretty much every country is the same.
European governments regularly lose cases brought by individuals in both domestic and European courts; below are some well-known examples across different countries and legal issues.
E.g.
Broniowski v. Poland (ECtHR, 2004)
Doğan and Others v. Turkey (ECtHR, 2004)
Hirst v. United Kingdom (No. 2) (ECtHR, 2005)
Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3) (ECtHR, 2012)
KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland (ECtHR, 2024)
These judgments show that individuals and civil society groups can hold European states accountable for violations involving property, voting, asylum, climate, and broader rule‑of‑law issues.
They often lead to legislative change, financial compensation, or policy reversal, and many are used as precedent by lawyers and activists in new cases across Europe.
I’m not a lawyer, and many of these cases are not famous enough to be reported on in a format easily understandable to a layperson. I’m also not going to read through case resolutions to respond to a hacker news comment. I did take a cursory look at the examples you wrote though.
I will admit that my original statement lacks nuance, which makes it easy to nitpick.
Having read some of your cases though, a pattern emerged: it’s usually supra national organizations adjudicating these cases, and the nations are not bound by the rulings.
For example, in Hirst vs UK it was ruled that it’s a violation of human rights to deny prisoners the vote, and yet the UK government deliberately ignored that ruling and as a result prisoners still can’t vote in the UK. Not to mention that when this case was brought up in a UK court it was dismissed.
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It happens all the time here. Wealth isn't even a precondition, but indeed, one needs time and/or money. It helps being organized with other people to share the burden. Over here we have also got the ombudsman.
It is a matter of degrees. The harder it is for a poor individual to be done justice against the government, the weaker the rule of law. On a tangent, parties that play the horn about "law and order" usually mean "rules for thee but not for me".
Not sure where here is for you. But anyway, even if you can win a battle you can’t win a war. If a government wants to do something, it will regardless of how any individual person, rich or not, feels about it.
It just so happens that most western “democracies” are run by rich people, so they can avoid all that unpleasant business by just running the government in the first place.
Private companies have won against governments in ISDS courts:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/06/isds-fea...
I would say that’s an extension of the idea that rich people run the US government, which runs global organizations such as the world bank, which runs these ISDS courts.
China is just big enough to be able to ignore these global orgs.
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I think Durov recently went against France and won, and that's in the midst of Cold War II.