Justice Secretary: The Globe’s Most Misunderstood Middle Manager of Morality
Justice Secretary: A Title That Travels Poorly
By Our Correspondent Somewhere Slightly Safer Than Where You Are
The phrase “Justice Secretary” sounds like a job invented by a wishful-thinking focus group: a bureaucrat who keeps justice in a filing cabinet, dusts it off for photo-ops, and quietly mails it to the wrong address when no one’s looking. From Brasília to Bishkek, the title has become a sort of universal punchline uttered in every accent, usually right after the words “alleged” and “scandal.” Still, the position matters—if only because the person holding it decides which crimes make the statute books and which ones make the campaign brochures.
Take the United Kingdom, where the current Justice Secretary recently reassured Parliament that the plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda is “morally sound” and “operationally hilarious.” Meanwhile, the Rwandan Justice Secretary—yes, they have one too—was last seen politely asking London to send actual cash first, preferably in untraceable notes. Both secretaries insist they serve “the rule of law,” which is comforting until you notice the fine print: the rule in question is apparently “finders keepers.”
Across the Atlantic, the U.S. Attorney General (America’s grandiose rebrand of the role) just released a memo clarifying that classified documents found next to a Corvette in Delaware are “less illegal” than identical documents found next to a golf cart in Florida. The memo’s footnotes cite “contextual gravity,” a legal concept previously unknown outside of astrophysics departments. When asked whether justice was blind, the AG replied, “Only in one eye,” before being whisked away to a fundraiser where justice is auctioned by the canapé.
In the European Union, Justice Commissioners hold multilingual press conferences to announce synchronized wrist-slaps for tech giants. The fines are calculated by an algorithm that factors in GDP, lobbyist density, and the average price of a decent croissant. Last month Google was penalized the equivalent of three hours’ revenue; the company responded by auto-filling every EU citizen’s search bar with “Is this really necessary?”—proving either sincere remorse or market-tested sarcasm.
Not to be outdone, China’s Minister of Justice recently unveiled the world’s first blockchain gavel. Each strike is minted as an NFT, ensuring the verdict is immutable and—conveniently—unsellable on secondary markets. Dissenting opinions are recorded too, though mostly as metadata. When asked about due process, the minister replied that the process is fully automated and therefore “due,” give or take a millisecond.
In Latin America, the title rotates more often than a lazy Susan. Brazil’s latest Justice Secretary took office on a Tuesday, indicted his predecessor on Wednesday, and was himself indicted by Friday—setting a new land-speed record for the region’s famed “revolving door” jurisprudence. Mexico’s version prefers to work remotely, sending emojis instead of subpoenas. The ghost emoji is particularly popular; it translates roughly to “We both know where the bodies aren’t buried.”
Africa offers its own twist. South Africa’s Justice Minister recently admitted that the commission investigating state capture had captured the commission investigating it. The resulting press release was 700 pages long and entirely redacted for “privacy,” which is Zulu for “job security.” Meanwhile, in Sudan, the position has been vacant since 2021 because no applicant can survive the background check—mainly the part that asks, “Are you currently wearing a uniform?”
What unites these global custodians of justice is not jurisprudence but choreography: the synchronized nodding, the rehearsed outrage, the perfectly timed leak. The real constituency isn’t the public but the algorithmic audience—Twitter mobs, TikTok jurists, and hedge funds trading futures on tomorrow’s scandal. Justice Secretaries everywhere have learned to perform for that crowd while keeping the actual levers greased and out of frame.
And so the title endures, translated into every tongue, pronounced with every possible inflection of hope and dread. It remains a job description that promises to safeguard fairness while mostly safeguarding the job. Somewhere tonight, in a dim office lit by the glow of a shredding machine, a fresh appointee is rehearsing the oath: “To uphold the laws, so help me polling.” The rest of us can only watch, half-amused, half-complicit, and wonder which filing cabinet they finally stuffed justice into—assuming, of course, that anyone remembers what it looked like in the first place.
