16 Oct 2009 | Uncategorized
A inspiring evening at the British Museum on 14 October, hosted by writers’ charity English PEN, where the poet, playwright and classicist Tony Harrison was presented with the inaugural PEN/Pinter Prize.
Established by English PEN in memory of the Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter, it is to be awarded annually to a British writer or writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.
The PEN/Pinter Prize is also intended to be shared with an imprisoned writer of courage, selected by the winner in consultation with English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
Harrison chose the Burmese poet, performer and comedian Zargana, recently condemned to thirty-five years in prison for the ‘crime’ of independently organising aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis.
“When he was in solitary confinement he had to scratch his poems with a pot fragment on the floor of his cell, then commit them to memory,” Harrison told the audience at the award, closing his lecture to commemorate their joint award.
“May all those poets I have summoned up today make him at this moment the centre of their gaze and honour the prisoner-poet for his still defiant poetic gift.”
Burmese Theatre Workshop presents: Let Me Out of Hell at the Free Word Centre at 12.00 on 28th October 2009: A scratch performance of a new play about about Burma after cyclone Nargis, devised by Burmese Theatre Workshop and directed by Andrew Mclay. Details from the Free Word Centre, e-mail [email protected] or phone 020 7324 2570.
English PEN website.
16 Oct 2009 | Uncategorized
Friend of Index Allen Green has a great piece on libel reform over at CiF:
“The effect of libel chill is that the public do not have access to information that would properly inform their decision-making on important topics, such as public health and safety, or about the conduct of powerful corporations.
Accordingly, it is not journalists and publishers that require protection from libel law, but the public. We need a general public interest defence that can be balanced against the private right to reputation. This could be done legally by making the public interest a ground for invoking qualified privilege, which means malice or bad faith would have to be alleged to commence a claim where the public interest is plausibly engaged. Coupled with a statutory right to correction or reply for the claimant, this reform would provide appropriate protection to both claimants and defendants.”
Read the rest here
Index on Censorship and English PEN will soon be launching out joint report into libel reform. Watch this space.
20 May 2009 | Uncategorized
The UK parliament edged a step closer to repealing the archaic crimes of seditious libel and criminal defamation yesterday, as the House of Lords debated the government’s Coroners and Justice Bill on its second reading.
Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Anthony Lester QC, indicated his intention to table an amendment to the Bill that would abolish seditious and criminal libel, saying:
It took us 140 years to abolish the crime of blasphemy; I hope that this House will see fit to remove these crimes from our statute book as well. I hope that the government will support the amendments; indeed, there were straws in the wind indicating that they might do so.
This is very encouraging: should peers agree to an amendment, the change would need the tacit support of the government to remain in the Bill.
In March, Dr Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP, tabled similar amendments in the House of Commons (unfortunately never debated due to time constraints). Speaking at a meeting in Holborn yesterday evening, Dr Harris said that he too has heard supportive noises from the Ministry of Justice on this issue. Index on Censorship and English PEN will be lobbying the government to formalise this support, as soon as possible.
For campaigners, the abolition of seditious libel and criminal defamation in the UK would be an invaluable tool in the fight for free expression worldwide. In recent years, both Article 19 and International PEN have produced research on the widespread use of sedition and criminal defamation laws to silence legitimate political protest. Abolition in the UK should reinvigorate campaigns for change elsewhere.
The Coroners and Justice Bill raises several other free expression issues, which peers will debate in committee in June. These include the question of whether convicted criminals should have royalties from their memoirs confiscated, and whether laws that forbid hate speech on the grounds of sexual orientation need an amendment to protect those who might wish to question the morality of homosexual practices.
However, some peers criticised the government’s use of portmanteau bills to legislate on myriad topics. Lord Thomas of Gresford complained that the Bill was a “miscellany of no fewer than 15 discrete and complex topics that have been thrown together.” If the Coroners and Justice Bill succeeds in expanding the space for free speech in the UK, it will be ironic that the vehicle for reform is a method of legislation that many regard as undemocratic.
Robert Sharp is campaigns manager at English PEN
17 Feb 2009 | Uncategorized
English PEN director Jonathan Heawood was interviewed on the Little Atoms radio show last week by, er, me, and co-host Neil Denny. We discussed the origins of PEN, perceived limits of free expression, and the changes in censorship from a state-based to community-based phenomenon.
You can listen to the 30-minute interview here.
