9 Jul 2009 | Uncategorized
The news could not have come at a worse time for free speech campaigners. Revelations about private detectives have been paid large sums by the tabloid press to hack into the mobile phones and other records of public figures will cause damage to the newspaper at the heart of the practice, the News of the World. It will not enhance the credibility of its former Editor, Andy Coulson, now David Cameron’s trusted Director of Communications at the Conservative Party.
But the consequences are far more important than the future of a tabloid and a spin doctor. The scandal — for it is a scandal –– has unleashed a further bout of yelping from the “something must be done” brigade, the people in public life who argue that the media has long been “out of control”. Their cheerleader is Tony Blair, who famously used one of his last days as prime minister to take revenge on journalists, deriding them as “feral beasts”.
The painful truth is that, in one respect, these people are not wrong. British journalism contains no shortage of sleazy practice. And yet the context is entirely misleading. The biggest problem with the Fourth Estate is not that it finds out too much, but that it finds out too little. Investigative journalism is a declining art. Much of that is due to economics. It costs a considerable amount to deploy a team to eke out information about, say, a dodgy arms deal, unethical corporate practice, or British collusion in torture. Sometimes months of probing leads to nothing, and editors are under pressure to account for every penny they spend. Some of the decline is attributed to simply laziness. It takes a lot of effort to commission and see through difficult stories.
But the main impediment comes from Britain’s horrific libel laws. So skewed is the legislation and the practice that the burden of proof in court falls entirely on the media, rather than the plaintiff. The costs have grown beyond all proportion and are entirely out of sync with the original “offence”. This has led to malicious threats of prosecutions by the rich and famous, forcing newspapers to retract, even where they know the information to be correct, simply because they cannot afford to sustain their defence.
Britain has now become the libel capital of the world, the home of what has come to be known as “libel tourism”, the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and others to prosecute not just journalists, but book authors, even NGOs. The chilling effect is hard to quantify, because beyond the prosecutions and threats lies the self censorship that is affecting so much journalism at the moment. The new mantra, from the BBC to most newspapers, even now to some bloggers, is: “why cause trouble?”
The House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is putting the finishing to an enquiry it has been carrying out on “press standards, privacy and libel”—note the order. At Index on Censorship, in conjunction with English PEN, we have been conducting our own inquiry into the impact of libel. We have spoken to editors, lawyers, journalists, publishers, bloggers and NGOs in a unified campaign for changes in the libel law. We intend to issue our report in coming months as the government ponders its response to the Select Committee. We urge those preparing their conclusions to distinguish between robust investigative journalism that seeks to find out what the powerful would rather conceal from us and grubby and often illegal practice.
If they fail to make this distinction, if they tarnish us with the same brush, democracy and free expression will be the losers.
9 Jul 2009 | Index Index, minipost
On 2 July, the Federal Court of Appeal fined Sami al-Araimi 20,000 dirhams and suspend his newspaper, Emarat Alyoum, of which Araimi is editor-in-chief, for 20 days. The conviction stems from an October 2006 article in the paper alleging a UAE-based company gave steroids to local race horses owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family.
Read more here
9 Jul 2009 | Uncategorized
I’m not sure which piece of unpopular Irish news is being buried by which: the announcement of a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, or the shuffling through of a law creating penalties for blasphemy, an offence that has never properly existed in the Irish state.
While there is certainly a store of resentment in the population at being asked to vote again (that is: vote properly, you morons, as the government is barely holding back from saying) on the Lisbon Treaty, there is a certain sense of bafflement at the new blasphemy legislation, smuggled in under the guise of defamation law reform today. Nobody wanted this law: no one can think of a single thundering priest, austere vicar, irate rabbi or miffed mullah ever calling for tougher penalties for blasphemy. Certainly there were the frequent, and frequently ignored missives from Armagh, warning the Irish not to abandon God for 4x4s and Nintendo Wiis. And there was widespread dismay when popular comic Tommy Tiernan pushed the bible-baiting a bit too far on the Late Late Show. But never did anyone suggest we needed tough blasphemy laws. Until Justice Minister Dermot Ahern decided we needed to fill the “void” left by our lack of one.
Technically, Ahern is correct that Bunreacht na hÉireann requires that blasphemy be a criminal offence. However, no one ever bothered to formulate what the exact offence might be, and we muddled on for quite a long time without anyone worrying about this (perhaps, as a friend pointed out to me, because all blasphemous material was grabbed by the all-powerful censors long before it could ever get to court). In 1999, there was an attempt to prosecute a newspaper for a cartoon mocking the church, but the judge in that case noted that he could not prosecute, because there was no definition of what legally constituted blasphemy. Well now there is. And it concerns itself with what might or might not upset cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion” (note, not just Christianity, as was the case with English blasphemy law: this is, at least, equal opportunities idiocy).
As Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland has pointed out:
“The proposed law does not protect religious belief; it incentivises outrage and it criminalises free speech. Under this proposed law, if a person expresses one belief about gods, and other people think that this insults a different belief about gods, then these people can become outraged, and this outrage can make it illegal for the first person to express his or her beliefs.”
So Irish law has now enshrined the notion that the taking of offence is more important than free expression. If something might cause a motivated group to be “outraged”, rather than, say, cause them to live in fear, then it is illegal, with a fine of up to E25,000 payable.
Note the ease with which a prosecution could be brought, and the punitive nature of the fine: this is not legislation that simply serves to tie up a few loose ends.
The minister claimed that his only alternative to this legislation was to have a referendum. This again, is technically true: any constitutional change in Ireland requires this. But the minister dismissed the notion of organising a referendum as being too costly in these straitened times.
Yet yesterday, we were told there is to be another Lisbon referendum in October. Wouldn’t it have been sensible to hold both the Lisbon referendum and a referendum on the abolition of the concept of blasphemy from the constitution on the same day, cutting down on costs? Wouldn’t it, minister?
8 Jul 2009 | Index Index, minipost
Ireland’s new blasphemy legislation has been passed through the Dáil as part of the Defamation Bill. The Bill will now go to the upper house, the Seanad
