An Interpol “red notice” has been issued for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in connection with sex crime allegations in Sweden. The notice, while not amounting to an arrest warrant, requests that anyone aware of the subject should alert police.
For months in advance of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Egyptian officials waged a rather strident campaign to fend off calls to allow international election monitors to observe the vote. The issue, they said, was out of the question and an insult to Egypt’s national sovereignty.
Instead, numerous officials said, an army of locally licensed election monitors and the combined focus of the international media would be more than enough to ensure that no electoral irregularities took place.
Journalists planning to cover the elections dutifully submitted to a tedious and bureaucratic process of applying for special Ministry of Information badges which, we were told, would allow us easy access into any of the country’s approximately 44,000 polling stations. In a parallel process, an estimated 6,000 prospective monitors from local non-governmental organizations received very impressive looking badges from the Higher Electoral Commission.
When election day came, it became very quickly apparent that there were no guarantees for anyone. Journalists across the country reported being turned away from polling stations by the police officers guarding the door. Licensed monitors reported the same phenomenon.
In Alexandria, I found a small group of monitors from a local NGO forced to observe a polling station from across the street after their cards were dismissed as insufficient.
“It has no value,” Mohammed Fawzi said of his monitoring badge. “They banned us from entering.”
Asked whether the officer had given any reason for dismissing the monitor ID, Fawzi, an architecture student at Alexandria University, smiled and shrugged. “It’s Egypt,” he said.
Instead Fawzi contented himself with observing the polling station from across the street, where he said he witnessed a pack of ranking officers establish control of the area and detain anyone taking pictures. To stay out of custody, Fawzi was forced to pretend he was talking on his cell phone, then sneakily take a picture using the built-in camera.
In a post-election day review of events, a coalition of local and international watchdog groups said examples like this were endemic across the country.
“The rather total lack of transparency about these elections puts the burden on Egyptian authorities to show others how these elections were not fatally compromised,” said Joe Stork, an official with Human Rights Watch who was briefly detained Sunday by police while documenting polling place violations.
It would be unfair to state that barring journalists and licensed monitors on election day was an official Egyptian government policy. After all, some journalists and some monitors were allowed in to some stations.
What’s probably more accurate is that there was no government policy at all. No matter what the Ministry of Information or the Higher Electoral Commission issued us, true power lay in the hands of each polling station’s supervisor and the police officers who controlled the entrance.
As one western television journalist told me, “It was all about the mood of the polling place supervisor and whether I could talk my way into the place. I don’t think my badge got me any (access) that I couldn’t have gotten without it.”
A judgment handed down at the Supreme Court this morning recognises the need for reform in defamation proceedings, and points to two key areas. [Read the background to the case, Spiller v Joseph, here]
One of the most contentious areas in libel reform — jury trials — was put at the centre of the agenda when Lord Phillips questioned their effectiveness in defamation cases:
[…] has not the time come to recognise that defamation is no longer a field in which trial by jury is desirable? The issues are often complex and jury trial simply invites expensive interlocutory battles, such as this one before the court, which attempt to pre-empt issues from going before the jury.
It’s a reform that Lord Lester tackled in his private member’s bill earlier this year, which proposed that the presumption to jury trial should be reversed. The Supreme Court judgment today will put further pressure on the government to review whether jury trials are really the best forum for defamation cases.
The judgment will also have an impact on one of the most notoriously complex areas of libel law — the fair comment defence. Lord Phillips proposed that the defence be renamed “honest comment” and suggested removing the requirement that it be based on a matter of public interest. He added:
“Would it not be more simple and satisfactory if, in place of the objective test, the onus was on the defendant to show that he subjectively believed that his comment was justified by the facts on which he based it?”
Lord Phillips recommended that the whole area should be reviewed by the Law Commission.
Today in the High Court US medical device company NMT Medical was ordered to pay £200,000 into court in their libel action against cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst. Master Foster ruled that if NMT Medical do not pay this money by 18 January 2010 their libel claim will be struck out and the court will decide how much of Dr Wilmshurst’s costs NMT Medical should pay.
Dr Wilmshurst has been fighting since 2007 to defend his comments about a clinical trial of a heart device manufactured by NMT Medical. Losing the case could mean he loses his house. NMT Medical recently threatened to sue Dr Wilmshurst for libel again for comments he made about his case in a BBC Radio 4 Today Programme piece on the chilling effects of England’s libel laws on scientific and medical discussions