Lord Lester publishes his private member’s defamation bill on Thursday. In The Times this morning he argues libel must be rebalanced in the scales of justice; our present laws have a chilling impact on free speech — the lifeblood of democracy.
Lester acknowledges there will be resistance from the legal profession.
Until now, libel law has remained the preserve of a small group of lawyers skilled in its complex rules and procedures. It has been left to judges to fashion the law, in concert with some piecemeal reforms in the 1950s and 1990s that never addressed free speech and could not have anticipated a culture of online publication and debate.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lester outlines the changes he wants to see made to current laws.
The Human Rights group had planned a major campaign focused on oil giant Shell’s annual general meeting at London’s Barbican Centre today (18 May). A key part of this campaign was to be a full page advert in the Financial Times, portraying a champagne flute filled with oil.
But just as the working day came to a close yesterday, Amnesty staff received notice from the Financial Times that the ‘pink un would not be carrying the advert after all.
According to Index’s sources, the newspaper variously claimed that it was wary of libel claims and that the ad might be in poor taste, as some readers might mistake the oil in the glass for blood.
Taste issues aside, would it be legitimate for the FT to worry about libel? While Amnesty insists it “gave [the FT] written reassurances that we would take full responsibility for the comments and opinions stated in the advertisement”, the fact is that if the FT had published the ad, it could, potentially be liable in any proceedings.
But it’s extremely unlikely that Shell would sue. The company is quite keen on promoting its social credentials, and even a successful trip to court would more than likely involve an unpleasant trawl through the unfortunate effects of the oil industry.
Was it a commercial decision? Again, who knows? Big oil companies tend not to be so thin-skinned that they would pull money from a prestige publication such as the FT merely because it had carried a critical advert. Trafigura may have trampled all over free expression, but the issue there was company documents and detailed reports, not a generally critical ad.
It is genuinely quite hard to think of a good reason for the FT to pull this ad.
On 7 May, two newspaper employees were fined over an article criticising the Turkish army’s system of patronage. Over 300 army generals sued the pro-Islamic Vakit newspaper for libel over an article entitled “The country where people who cannot become corporals become generals”. Haron Aksoy and Nuri Aykon were fined TL616,000 (£275,000) for the 2003 article.
In other news, an Istanbul court sentenced two journalists for spreading terrorist propaganda. İrfan Aktan was handed a five-year prison sentence and Merve Erol received a heavy fine for “spreading propaganda for an illegal organisation” over an article for the Express newspaper.
