20 Jul 10 | Uncategorized
So, I can’t speak for you lot, but I haven’t spent the week reading Peter Mandelson’s diaries. I haven’t compared and contrasted them to Alastair Campbell’s recollections of the same events. I haven’t felt moved to accuse him of betraying everything the Labour party is trying to do, or has ever done. And I haven’t reconsidered my understanding of the last 13 years in the light of his words. What I have done is skim-read about 10,000 newspaper columns in which the writers do one or more of the above. I’ve even skimmed over the meta-articles, in which the writer points out that all the jumping up and down and name-calling provoked by Mandy so far merely serves to prove that he was telling the truth all along.
And the reason I haven’t read his book, or excerpts or his book, or comments on articles about his book is because, if I am absolutely honest, I don’t care. I can’t imagine my view of the last ten years or so of government will be remotely influenced by hearing, again, that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown didn’t get on very well. I’m just not interested anymore. They’re both gone, best of luck to ’em, now can we talk about the something else? Like the fact that my GP is now supposed to be good at all kinds of things beyond doctoring, when I’m not completely sure she’s even up to mustard on that. Or the fact that the BBC might lose its licence fee, even though we will then end up with telly that makes Channel 4 look interesting.
Or we could talk about books which have a real impact in the real world, and not just in the op-ed pages and on the Daily Politics (much as I love it). Alan Shadrake, a freelance journo, has been arrested in Singapore, for writing a book about Singaporean justice. And Singaporean justice seems to be as much of a contradiction in terms as Mandelsonian Loyalty (see how I tricked you into thinking that section was over and then called it right back? I am sneaky beyond belief).
And Shadrake is 75-years-old, has recently recovered from cancer, and has high blood pressure, so being arrested might not be the same walk in the park for him that it might be for you or me. In spite of his illness, he still found time to write Once A Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice In The Dock. He has interviewed the country’s most prolific (is that the word, in this context?) hangman. And he hasn’t snuck away from Singapore like any other person in their right mind would do. He’s stayed there to promote the book, and now he’s been arrested. Arrested and charged with defamation, for which he could be imprisoned for two years.
You might be wondering who he defamed. The country’s most prolific hangman, perhaps? Or a judge? Or a policeman? Wrong every time, sunshine — he’s charged with defaming the country’s judicial system. How can it be possible to defame a system? Has he hurt the feelings of individual lawyers? All of them? And if so, couldn’t they bill someone for an extra hour, cackle softly, and grow the fuck up? I hope Index on Censorship readers will jump up and down and make noise about this: his lawyer hasn’t been allowed to see him yet, and Singapore’s justice system doesn’t need another victim.
20 Jul 10 | News and features
The US senate last night passed legislation to protect US journalists, writers and publishers from “libel tourists” — litigants who sue Americans in foreign jurisdictions which place a lower emphasis on free speech
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16 Jul 10 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
A court in Kuwait City has acquitted a journalist prosecuted for insulting Kuwait’s Prime Minister. Journalist Mohammed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem and activist Khaled Al-Fadala, had their charges dropped on 12 July . Al-Jassem was accused of libelling the prime minister on a talk show entitled “Who is to blame, the government or the parliament?”. Al-Fadala’s case was initiated following an official complaint from the prime minister following the activist’s claim that the prime minister was an “enemy of freedom of expression” in Kuwait. Al-Jassem was jailed after he was convicted of slander in April 2010 in a separate case.
12 Jul 10 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
It was the most iconic image of the second intifada: the killing of a Palestinian child. Ten years on, French libel courts are still settling disputes about what really happened at the Netzarim crossroads. Natasha Lehrer reports
Just over two years ago the French appeals court overturned a guilty verdict against Philippe Karsenty. The blogger was originally found guilty of libelling Charles Enderlin, the veteran French television correspondent whose report on the killing in September 2000 of 12-year-old Mohammed al Dura by an Israeli bullet has been the subject of controversy for a decade. Now Karsenty has won his own libel case against the broadcaster Canal + and the magazine L’Express.
In June this year, Canal + and TAC PRESSE, an independent television company, were found guilty of libelling Karsenty in a 2008 programme on the subject of media hoaxes. The programme drew parallels between the September 11 conspiracy theorists and Karsenty, who has spent almost 10 years challenging the veracity of Enderlin’s 2000 report for the state television station France 2. The court found that the failure of Stéphane Malterre, the documentary’s director, to make any mention whatsoever of the many doubts that have been raised about the original news report and which have been widely reported around the world — considerably more so than in France itself — constituted evidence of a lack of good faith on the part of the programme makers and the broadcaster Canal +, and justified Karsenty’s claim of libel.
An article by the journalist Vincent Hugueux, in the magazine L’Express, published the same day that Malterre’s documentary was broadcast, reiterated the accusation that Karsenty was a hoaxer.
In Rumeurs, intox: les nouvelles guerres de l’info….Stephane Malterre showed us various recent hoaxes, from the rantings after the September 11th attacks to the concerted attacks on the journalist Charles Enderlin.
…. The episode on the journalist Charles Enderlin, target of a campaign as loathesome and relentless as it is inept, had the merit of exposing two specimens in thrall to a pathetic form of nervous obsession: the historian Richard Landes and the Frenchman Philippe Karsenty.
On 1 July 2010, the presiding judge found in favour of Karsenty, L’Express was found guilty of libel. However, the judge rejected Karsenty’s claim for €25,000 damages, finding that Hugueux was influenced by the content of Malterre’s documentary and therefore had written his article in good faith.
In an interesting footnote to this long-running case, the judgment includes the following statement: “Philippe Karsenty acted in good faith by exercising his right to criticise Charles Enderlin for having broadcast a faked report.” Karsenty has made clear his satisfaction in this interestingly unequivocal statement, avowing in his own press release that the judgement will “be useful in the future because it confirms that France 2’s news report was phony and that [the] Canal + documentary was defamatory and manipulative enough to influence a journalist”. It seems highly unlikely that the judgment signals the end of this affair.
Natasha Lehrer is a writer and translator. She lives in Paris.
