Too often, the rich and powerful can buy their way out of the legal consequences of their actions. Yet the cohesion of our society depends on the same law applying to everyone - and on people having at least some reason to believe this. In this respect, 2025 was a dismal year internationally. If democracy is to survive, the judiciary must show its teeth.
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Across Europe and the world, politicians are campaigning with the promise to "get tougher on crime". This is populist at best, racist at worst – and could not be in starker contrast to reality. Many people buy it and then enjoy the performative security theatre: internal European (presumably illegal) border controls are introduced, drug controls are stepped up, refugees are "remigrated", supposed social profiteers are paraded. And the few, small fish with which the "law and order" wannabe deep-sea anglers allow themselves to be photographed with a tape measure and outstretched thumb are hiding the fact that the big fish are once again going through the net – or being let go. Here are just a few examples:
Meta has paid eight billion dollars so that its CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not have to testify in court. A small price to pay for their boss not having to justify the Cambridge Analytica scandal and not having to say a word about how his company sold millions of users' data to political actors in order to organise targeted propaganda campaigns, without which Brexit would probably never have happened. Without which Putin-understander Donald Trump might never have been elected. One of the biggest coordinated attacks on democracy, which tore the EU apart and destroyed the old world order, is being swept under the carpet. Meta posted a net profit of 62.36 billion euros in 2024. It cost them 12.8 per cent of that to leave it all behind. For the fact that there will never be a judgement.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy spent three weeks in prison before he was released. Three, in his words, "hard" weeks, three weeks of "nightmare", a sentence of actually five years, for a criminal conspiracy aimed at using funds from Libyan dictator and human rights violator Muammar Gaddafi for Sarkozy's re-election campaign. Three weeks out of 260, that's 1.1 per cent. Exactly long enough for him to publish a book about it, which will certainly earn him some small change.
Elon Musk had to provide zero accountability for the fact that his chatbot Grok digitally stripped the clothes off real flesh-and-blood underage children over several days, publicly and for all to see. Zero accountability for the fact that his programme produced and distributed digital child abuse material. As a reminder, this is the justification the European Parliament used to plan to completely strip all EU citizens of their digital privacy purely as a preventative measure. Now a public company, with a world-renowned CEO, produces CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) … and nothing happens. It should not be forgotten that a few months ago the same software approved of Adolf Hitler's actions and even suggested destroying sections of the population in order to solve social problems. This also had no consequences for the richest man in the world.
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