Russia’s expulsion of the Guardian’s Luke Harding is part of a policy of attempting to control reportage, say Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
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The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent has been expelled from Russia. Luke Harding attempted to re-enter Russia on the weekend, instead his visa was annulled and he was detained in an airport cell for 45 minutes before being returned to the UK on the next available flight. He was told: “For you Russia is closed“. This is thought to be the first incident of this kind since the cold war ended, the Russians are yet to provide an official explanation. Harding’s removal came after he reported on claims made in leaked US diplomatic cables that Russia had become a “virtual Mafia state” under Vladimir Putin, he also also co-authored Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.
In the wake of the John Terry case the Guardian gathered a panel of libel experts — including Index’s Chief Executive John Kampfner – to debate legal reform.
The discussion, chaired by the Guardian’s Director of editorial legal services, Gill Phillips, included three claimant media lawyers, Dominic Crossley from the law firm Collyer Bristow, Sarah Webb from Russell Jones & Walker and Jonathan Coad from Swan Turton; Kampfner, Jane Martinson, MediaGuardian’s Editor, and Gavin Millar a QC from Doughty Street Chamber who represents the press lined up on the other side.
The panel covered libel tourism, the public interest defence, codification, costs, procedure, juries and the burden of proof.
Libel tourism is a non-existent issue if you speak to claimant lawyers and judges — see Lord Hoffman’s speech earlier this month — but there’s an interesting quote from Millar who claims that our claimant-friendly system is particularly hospitable to the wealthy and powerful.
We have to be very careful about saying that there aren’t many visible cases of forum-shopping. Most of my American clients who have libel claims filed against them in the high court have stopped fighting them. They’ve decided it’s not worth it any more. Other foreign clients are reluctant to write on the internet because they are scared of being sued. The current law was formulated on the basis of principles designed for commercial cases, not for 21st-century media cases with significant freedom of expression elements.
John Kampfner argued libel law as it stands is chilling free speech, forcing journalists to self-censor. He gave an example.
[A] good broadsheet editor told me that his board had said to him: ‘Please lay off the oligarchs – it’s just not worth our while.’ How can you quantify that? Things are not reaching the courts in the first place because the journalism is not being done. That is what the current law is doing.
The only area the group seem to have found any common ground was an agreement that costs are spiraling. If you want an illustration of why the cost of defending a libel action is prohibitive, look no further that a recent example provided by Private Eye. The magazine reports that model Matt Peacock accepted £15,000 from the Sunday Mirror after the paper claimed his relationship with his former wife Jodie Marsh was violent. The legal costs were eye-watering. Carter Ruck claimed £380,000, an astonishing 25 times more than their client received.
The use of so-called “insult laws” to censor legitimate criticism of a country’s leader is a tool of authoritarian regimes everywhere, and now, it seems Iraq too. On Tuesday Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was awarded damages of 100 million dinars ($85,000) in damages in a defamation case against Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The paper had run a story describing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s administration as “increasingly autocratic” and quoted three unnamed Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) members as saying “elements of Maliki’s rule resembled a dictatorship”.
Almost as if to prove him right the court — meeting in closed session and without hearing any evidence from the Guardian — found in his favour. While the post Saddam-era constitution’s Article 38 guarantees freedom of speech, there are a rack of laws in the country’s largely unreformed Penal Code that prohibit insult on pain of jail.
In this case INIS — clearly embarrassed by the loose talk among their supposed “secret” policemen — were looking not to jail them, but to secure a public apology, the closure of the Guardian office in Baghdad, disclosure of the unnamed sources and $1m in damages for Maliki, even though Maliki’s spokesmen maintain that he is not behind the writ.
Direct appeals to Maliki’s office saw off the threat to close the Guardian’s Baghdad office, but the action, begun in May 2009, rolled on to its conclusion on 10 November. The paper is to appeal.
During the case, said the Guardian, they had not been given the opportunity to present any evidence or had even been asked to give a written statement to the court.
The court asked a panel of three prominent members of the country’s independent journalists’ union for their opinion. Their view was that the article, by the paper’s award-winning correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, was neither defamatory nor damaging.
The NCIS sought and got a second opinion from a group of five experts of their own. This group, including the host of a legal affairs show on state TV, Salah Najim al-Maliki, concluded the opposite in what the Guardian was told –– they were not allowed to see their report — was “very hostile and unfavourable” language.
The allegedly defamatory article was published on the day that the Iraqi PM arrived in London to meet potential UK investors in Iraq. Interestingly both sides argued that the supposed slight that Maliki suffered did not deserve payment of damages.
Dozens of media outlets have sprung up in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and Iraqi journalists enjoy considerable freedom compared to before and to other Middle Eastern countries. Nevertheless the tools to prohibit insult are still in the penal code toolbox if needed.
Countries with laws prohibiting insult of public officials keep them “to intimidate” opposition, says US-based World Press Freedom Committee chairman Richard N. Winfield in a recent report by the group. “Complete repeal is the only sensible remedy.”