Journalist Abdul-Elah Haidar Shaye should have been released from prison as part of concessions to protesters in Yemen. But a phonecall from the US president has kept him behind bars. Iona Craig reports
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As hundreds of mirror sites circumvent attempts at internet censorship of the Cablegate documents, Wikileaks journalist James Ball calls on the US to remember its principles on internet freedom
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President Barack Obama has signed the SPEECH Act into US law, a move designed to protect US writers and reporters from England’s controversial defamation laws.
The Act, tabled by Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen, makes libel judgments against American writers in foreign territories unenforceable if they are perceived to counter the First Amendment right to free speech. The Libel Reform Campaign has expressed concern that our reputation is being damaged internationally due to our restrictive, archaic and costly libel laws which cost 140 times the European equivalent.
The SPEECH Act is inspired by the Libel Terrorism Protection Act passed by the New York State Assembly in February 2008, after American academic Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld was sued by a wealthy Arab businessman Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz in the High Court in London. Only 23 copies of Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil were sold in Britain whereas the vast majority of copies were distributed in the US. Mahfouz had little prospect of successfully suing Ehrenfeld in the US Courts as a result of First Amendment protection, so sued in the High Court in London, where free speech is less protected.
The Bill was passed by voice vote in the US Congress on 27 July 2010, at the time Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen said:
“Libel tourism is the name given to the practice of doing an end run around the first amendment by suing American authors and publishers for defamation in the courts of certain foreign countries with defamation laws that don’t accord the same respect to free speech values as we do. Britain is a nation that particularly is assiduous for these actions… The United Kingdom has become the favoured destination for libel tourists.”
The coalition government has said it will table a draft Bill to reform our libel laws in January 2011 after the campaign led by English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science. The campaign has 52,000 signatories to its petition and all three main political parties committed in their general election manifestos to libel reform.
Jo Glanville, Editor of Index on Censorship said:
“The US’s response to our libel laws has already played a key role in advancing the campaign for reform in the UK. I’m hopeful that the government’s draft bill will address the issue of libel tourism, which has a clear chilling effect on freedom of speech, and make it harder for claimants from outside the EU to bully publishers, NGOs, bloggers and investigative journalists into silence.”
Síle Lane, Public Liaison of Sense About Science said:
“As other countries move to protect their citizens from the chilling effect of our libel laws we urge bloggers, science writers, NGOs and small publications facing threats and bankruptcy to keep up the pressure on the Government to ensure that the proposed draft libel bill brings the meaningful change that is so urgently needed.”
Jonathan Heawood, the Director of English PEN said:
“It’s hugely embarrassing that other countries are passing laws to protect their citizens from libel actions in our High Court. English libel lawyers claim that libel tourism is not a problem, if this is the case why has President Obama just signed into law a measure to protect his citizens from our Courts?”
Mark Stephens, a leading media lawyer and Index on Censorship trustee said:
“This marks a new low in Anglo-American jurisprudence and is the first time since Boston Tea Party that English judgments will not be enforced in America. All other non-defamation judgments will continue to be enforced thus marking out English libel laws as aberrant.”
So here’s where I’ve been: New York. I know. Get me. And I had a very lovely time indeed, even if I now don’t believe there are any Picassos left anywhere else in the world. Which there can’t be, because I saw at least 10,000 of them at MoMA, The Met and the Guggenheim. So Europe must be Picasso-less, and no-one’s mentioned it. Weird. Other things I did on my holidays included seeing Angela Lansbury in A Little Night Music. Read that and weep, Murder, She Wrote fans. Jessica Fletcher playing an ageing courtesan and mother to Catherine Zeta-Jones. I kept expecting someone to stagger on with a knife between their shoulderblades, and Lansbury to leap up and solve the crime. It is the only thing that could have improved the night.
But don’t think I wasn’t thinking about you Indexers the whole time I was away, because I was. I thought about you every morning watching Good Morning America. And I especially thought of you when the story turned to President Obama’s irritation with BP. Early last week, maybe Monday, the President said he wanted to know whose ass he should be kicking, with regard to the environmental calamity in the Gulf of Mexico. Now it seems to me that there are a lot of asses he should be kicking: BP, obviously; Halliburton; George W Bush, who apparently granted the drilling licences; anyone who drives a child the size of a small dog around in a mini-van the size of a small tank and considers that sensible behaviour; and pretty much all of us who want to use electricity, travel about, buy stuff and retain the moral high-ground. Then when he’s finished kicking global ass (with the exception of a few anti-consumerist hermits), he can get on with being President again.
Only, Good Morning America couldn’t report that Obama wanted to kick some ass. They are not allowed to say “ass” on the news there. They had to say “butt”. Which, if nothing else, begs the question of how much less rude than ‘ass’ ‘butt’ really is. I think they’re roughly on a par. But I guess America thinks differently. And it made me realise that we spend a lot of time bemoaning our crappy freedom of speech laws in this country — and with good reason. We mutter about the libel laws here, and how American senators call it Libel Terrorism and so on and so on. And so I had kind of slid into the belief that America is the land of the free and we are the oppressed.
But I had simply forgotten that freedom of speech doesn’t exist on American TV (with honourable exceptions like HBO). So much so that they can’t report accurately a statement made in public by their president. He can say it, but they can’t. That is, no matter how you look at it, batshit. Even David Letterman gets bleeped for minor swearing, and his show goes out at 11.30 at night. So next time we’re wringing our collective hands at our crappy libel laws, let’s all at least take a moment to thank our lucky stars that if David Cameron calls someone a prick, the BBC will most likely be able to say so.