21 Nov 2010 | Asia and Pacific, China
Wangyi09’s twitter feed stops abruptly at 7:45AM on October 28. According to human rights groups, the Chinese rights activist, whose real name is Cheng Jianping, was detained later that day for a satirical tweet she had posted on October 17 which mocked anti-Japanese protesters by urging them to destroy the Japanese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Her husband-to-be, Hua Chunhui, also a rights activist, said the day she was grabbed by police was to have been their wedding day. (more…)
19 Nov 2010 | Events, News and features
Jude Law, Ian McKellen and Samuel West take to the stage in support of Belarus Free Theatre
5 December 2010
“When people are being kidnapped and killed, then you have to take action to change things in your country” (Natalia Koliada, co-founder of Belarus Free Theatre).
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19 Nov 2010 | Uncategorized
Libel Reform Campaign has today published a new guide about libel laws for bloggers.
The guide, entitled ‘So you’ve had a threatening letter. What can you do?’ is published by Index on Censorship in association with Sense About Science, English PEN, the Media Legal Defence Initiative, the Association of British Science Writers and the World Federation of Science Journalists.
The report seeks to better explain English libel law for people who have been threatened with legal action for blogs, comments or articles they have posted online.
It addresses the essential questions, namely the strength of the claimant’s threat and how the defendant should respond. Today’s publication comprises just a part of the Libel Reform Campaign’s wider efforts to make English libel law simpler, cheaper, and less favourable to the claimant. If the campaign is successful, it is hoped changes will come into force that will better defend online publishers and writers against defamation actions.
19 Nov 2010 | News and features, United Kingdom
Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL (UK), Mumsnet and the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) have written an open letter to the Prime Minister David Cameron calling for urgent reform of our libel laws. Currently, forum providers and ISPs are being forced to act as judge and jury over the content of websites, blogs and online discussions. The effect is that libel threats are causing online content to be censored, even when the material is not actually defamatory. The internet companies are angered that the multiple publication rule which they are bound by, predates not only the invention of the internet, but that of the light bulb
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