I have a sort of science-fiction story premise that I haven't worked out. A US president finds twenty or so monsters in the security state, people with the highest type of the security clearances and who can possibly be induced to become something like Beria, and he makes an executive order using something like the Atomic Energy Act to create an office for securing US nuclear material-- very obviously this office must be exceedingly secret and have, within its domain, very great powers. But he appoints these twenty men he finds to it, and he arranges for many of his political opponents to travel to the District of Columbia, where he uses ordinary policemen to arrest them contrary to law, but using administrative warrants so as to secure the co-operation of the policemen, in bringing his political opponents to places where they are killed to by these men working for this new office; he continues to use administrative warrants and certain other deception to get people to D.C. to be killed.

Now of course, you could imagine that this would be some sort of fascist takeover story, but instead the guy lets courts continue, with them working as they do in real life, unhindered-- no threats, no special instructions, nothing.

Instead we get to see prosecutors not bringing suit, because they can't, because they of course work for the executive branch, state prosecutors not being able to bring suit, because it's D.C., civil lawsuits dismissed because the executive invokes the state secrecy privilege-- all while the government is ordering people to D.C. and conducting mass executions.

I was inspired by the El-Masri case, and some other cases of this sort and it eventually became clear to me that it the US executive could basically conduct an actual straight-up holocaust, obviously illegally, but without the courts intervening. This is why I think things like the duty to prosecute and the right of courts to evaluate evidence freely, that we have in Sweden, and the ECHR right to an effective remedy are so important.

We've failed in this sort of thing too though. In North Macedonia the men working for North Macedonia who held El-Masri for some time have not been prosecuted even now, even though North Macedonia has sent an official apology and paid him what the the ECtHR asked. Still the CoM of the CoE should have intervened more aggressively and ensured that North Macedonia actually prosecuted at least those of the perpetrators who are among their politicians and bureaucrats.

I think we in the EU might even need to bring back some limited form of private prosecutions or other measures to deal with the worst-case situations, where states go after people, because there should not be impunity even for people working in state security.