Index on Censorship on Night Waves
Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville and contributor Kenan Malik will be discussing the fallout from Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves tonight.
Here’s the blurb:
Matthew Sweet presents a Night Waves Landmark dedicated to one of the most politically controversial novels of recent times: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. On Valentine’s Day 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, forcing the novelist into hiding and creating an international cause célèbre, the reverberations of which can still be felt today. 20 years on, Matthew and a roundtable of guests from all sides of the dispute discuss the legacy of the Rushdie Affair. They explore the broader issues it raised: the value of freedom of expression, the question of whether art can offend, and the place of Islam and multiculturalism in British society.
The panel of guests are the film-maker Navid Akhtar, whose documentaries include Young Angry and Muslim; Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship; Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches English at Cambridge University, and is the author of a new book, The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration, the writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik, author of a new study called The Rushdie Affair – from Fatwa to Jihad, and the inter-faith theologian Martin Palmer.
You can listen online here
Twitter ye not…
Or maybe do. For those of you who Twitter, you can now find Index on Censorship at http://twitter.com/Indoncensorship. For those of you who don’t — why not?
Libel progress at Commons
You may have noticed the announcement earlier this week of a joint inquiry in to libel by Index on Censorship and English PEN. The issue of the unfairness of UK defamation laws has been exercising us for some time, and we’re not the only ones.
Today saw an adjournment debate at the House of Commons on the subject of libel laws, featuring contributions from Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and UKIP MPs.
The debate was initiated by Labour MP Denis MacShane, with support from Lib Dem Norman Lamb and Tory Michael Gove, (Gove is, of course, still a working journalist for the Times, and Denis MacShane is a former officer of the National Union of Journalists who regularly writes in the national media.
MacShane expressed his concern over libel tourism, which he described as ‘an international scandal which shames Britain’. He also proposed a ‘small claims court’ system for libel which would limit the amounts of fees totted up by lawyers in defamation cases, saying ‘the object [of defamation proceedings] is to gain correction and an apology, not to create a racket for lawyers’.
Norman Lamb expressed his concern over the extension of defamation laws to the Internet, where it seems possible that even a blogger providing a link to a story could find himself open to accusations of defamation.
Lib Dem Evan Harris sought to expand the debate to broader free expression issues, including the fact that England still has sedition laws — which he saw as providing a background whereby other states could justify their own sedition laws.
Tory MP (and barrister) Edward Garnier sought to defend his legal colleagues, particularly those in certain legal firms he felt had been ‘defamed’ in the session, saying: ‘We [MPs] ought to be big enough to admit that it is our fault the we do nothing [on press issues].
‘[E]ither we should get on with it, or we should stop whingeing and let judges and lawyers do their job.’
Finishing up the meeting, Bridget Prentice from the Ministry of Justice agreed to consider whether reform of the civil law is necessary, and promised a consultation paper on defamation and the Internet in the New Year, and to seek views at the same time on criminal defamation.
So it looks like the wheels may be in motion. The key now must be to a) keep the pressure on, and b) come up with positive suggestions for change. Any thoughts?
Update: The Hansard transcript of the debate can be read here