20 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
This article was published on Comment is Free
Police warnings that anyone attempting to burn a union flag during the royal wedding next week will be arrested are part of a worrying drift towards a legally sanctioned fetishisation of symbols both religious and secular in Britain. The warning came following an application by the far-right Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades (an offshoot of the outlawed al-Muhajiroun) to protest near Westminster Abbey on 29 April.
Earlier this week, Andrew Ryan, an English Defence league member with a history of public order offences, including racial chanting, was sentenced to 70 days in prison for burning a Qu’ran (he also received a 30-day sentence, to be served concurrently, for stealing the book from a local library).
The symbolic burning of books is wrong. The imprisonment of English Defence League member Andrew Ryan for burning a copy of the Qur’an is wrong. These two sentences are not contradictory.
In January, Ryan stole a Qur’an from a Carlisle library (that is definitely wrong, by the way), took it to Carlisle town hall and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter, while shouting derogatory slogans about Islam. It was, district judge Gerald Chalk commented when sentencing Ryan, “an act of theatrical bigotry”.
This is true: but does it amount to racially aggravated harassment, for which Ryan was convicted?
One could claim so if Ryan had taken his one-man protest to a local mosque, or Islamic cultural centre, or actively sought Muslims in the area. But he went to the town hall. So it’s difficult to see who exactly he was harassing. “Harassment” suggests targeted action.
He could, perhaps, have been convicted instead under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which is the law that did for al-Muhajiroun member Emdadur Choudhury, fined £50 for burning poppies on Armistice Day. That law itself is deeply insidious in its vagueness, and has been used several times in the arrest of street preachers putting forward conservative Christian views on homosexuality.
It’s worth mentioning Choudhury’s paltry fine, because that is certainly what Ryan’s supporters in the English Defence League will do. Why is it that one act of theatrical bigotry merits a fine, and another a 70-day jail sentence? Why does the desecration of a symbol of national mourning merit less punishment than the desecration of a religious text? While judges’ decisions are independent, this will only add to the EDL and its supporters notion that there really is “one law for them … “.
The English Defence League will be keen to portray Andrew Ryan as a martyr. They now have their very own shahid, persecuted for his beliefs by the deadly combination of Islamists and an establishment all too keen to capitulate.
So here, then, we have a practical argument against both these convictions: when we privilege certain types of speech, we create grievance. When we privilege in law certain ideas, we create resentment against people who hold those ideas. We see this in every impotent rage against “political correctness”; every indignant howl on the protection of religion and believers. The social cohesion argument that underpins so many government and police curbs on free expression does not really seem to be working.
Choudhury and Ryan were both convicted for actions that some might find upsetting. Their convictions legitimise and deepen the culture of taking offence that will not be resolved unless we begin to accept that free speech is not always easy to defend, but vital if this not to become an island of seething, hidden resentments masquerading as a coherent nation. More jaw-jaw, less law-law?
08 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
News International’s apology over phone hacking, welcome and overdue as it is, cannot “draw a line” under phone hacking.
This gesture, and the settlement of some of the private claims for breach of privacy by hacking victims, must not bring to a halt the process of exposing the facts, because so far we have only seen a small fraction of those facts. The litigants and their lawyers have transformed our understanding of what happened by their relentless demands for documents from the police and the company, but we need that process to continue.
As the former Tory Cabinet minister, Lord Fowler, has said, only a public inquiry will get to the bottom of this. That’s what it will take to address the full breadth of issues at stake, from the role of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to the relationships between News International and government, and from the sinister silence of the rest of the tabloid press to the conduct of senior company executives right up to Rupert Murdoch himself. Who was doing this? Who knew? When? Was there a cover-up? What was the role of the phone companies? Who was implicated? We need an exhaustive investigation.
What we are dealing with here, after all, appears to have been a sustained assault on the privacy of dozens and possibly hundreds of people, from royalty to Cabinet ministers, and from film actors and sportsmen to journalists and ordinary private citizens. We still have no idea of its full extent — whether, for example, other newspapers were engaged in the same practices. All this has important national security implications and raises big questions about how Britain is governed. And as with Watergate, the crime may have been bad, but the sequel was worse.
So far as News International executives are concerned, they must not be allowed to escape appropriate public scrutiny. In admitting, by implication at least, that Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were not the only News of the World employees engaged in illegally accessing people’s voicemails, they formally put to rest the “single rogue reporter” defence they sustained from 2007 until this January. But they must now be forced to explain themselves properly, not just in a brief, slick corporate statement, but one by one in an inquiry witness box, under cross-examination from leading barristers.
How, for example, do they now justify the company’s oft-repeated claim that, back in 2006-7, it thoroughly investigated the affair, that it deployed a top firm of white-collar fraud experts on the task, that it interrogated its own reporters and sifted through thousands of emails, and that the failure of these Herculean efforts proved its innocence?
Colin Myler, the paper’s editor, told the Press Complaints Commission in 2007 and the House of Commons Select Committee on the media in 2009 that he personally had led the investigation. Les Hinton, now the CEO of the Wall Street Journal, twice assured MPs that this investigation had been thorough. Tom Crone, head of legal affairs at News Group Newspapers, and Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, helped to make the same case.
It doesn’t end there. James Murdoch, now deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, approved a secret £700,000 payout to Gordon Taylor which prevented the public from learning important information about hacking, and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who refused to testify before MPs, should also account for her role. Are all these people really fit to hold senior positions in a leading public company? We should find out.
And in the background now is Andy Coulson, former editor of the paper and former media adviser to David Cameron. He told MPs he knew nothing of phone hacking, and repeated the assertion under oath in a court of law. It is now acknowledged that his ignorance was not limited to what his royal editor was up to. So just how extensive was it?
We need an inquiry. Indeed if we don’t have one, if we let it lie on the strength of a few million in compensation, we are accepting that there is no kind of trouble that Rupert Murdoch and his company can’t buy their way out of.
READ ALL OF BRIAN CATHCART’S BRILLIANT ANALYSIS OF THE PHONEHACKING SCANDAL HERE
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University. He tweets at @BrianCathcart
23 Mar 11 | Uncategorized
The next evolutionary stage of the court injunction has arrived: they now come “hyper” sized apparently.
John Hemming MP has introduced us to the idea — a week after using his parliamentary privilege to reveal the existence of a super injunction involving banker Fred Goodwin. You can read the (long-winded) transcript of the adjournment debate on the Bill of Rights at Westminster Hall in full here.
“I will come to what I call hyper-injunctions. One of the freedom of speech issues is that media organisations are generally commercial organisations, and there gets to be a point at which it is not worth their while trying to challenge the system and to get information out.
“With that, we return to the article nine issue [Bill of Rights] because our freedom of speech in the House is obviously on behalf of the citizens. We need to know of grievances so that we can raise them and talk about them publicly, so that the citizens of the UK can know.
“If it costs £20,000 or £30,000 in legal fees to write an article, in most circumstances a media organisation will just give up. The freedom of speech is basically sold down the river, because of the costs of the legal processes.”
Hemming described a case concerning the risk of toxic material in paint for drinking water tanks, in which a “hyper injunction” banned an individual from talking to an MP:
“There is a lot of stuff in that. It goes beyond a super-injunction; it is what I would call a hyper-injunction. It is an injunction in a case where someone is not even allowed to refer to the existence of these proceedings. There is the desire not to have the matter mentioned to Members of Parliament. There is also the interesting reference where it says ‘with the exception of lawyers or legal advisors instructed for the purpose.'”
He continued:
“Parliament is here to protect citizens of the UK, not MPs. The individual who was trussed up by that secret hyper-injunction needs protecting. We all need protecting from water that people are being told to drink without being warned that there are potentially toxins in it. That causes me great concern. This is about protecting people, not about using money and wealth to get legal processes to gag people. There is a way round these issues, but it requires Parliament to stand up for the people and for people’s right to communicate with Members of Parliament.”
Subsequently, Henry Fox discussed the legal issues at play on the Inforrm blog, looking at “the ability of MPs to disclose confidential information in Parliament and the ability of the media to report on these disclosures in order to evade liability for contempt of court”.
“The media controversy that surrounds injunctions is likely to continue and it is thus possible to foresee ‘media-friendly’ MPs attempting to circumvent the secrecy of injunctions on a more regular basis. It may well be that Parliament will have to reconsider some of the measures it considered in 1999 to avoid any interference with the administration of justice.”
As reported on this blog last week, Gill Phillips, the Guardian’s legal editorial director, recently flagged up the main developments in the field. But for any real progress in the super injunction debate, as David Heath concluded in the Westminster Hall debate, “we must wait and see what the Master of Rolls has to say on the subject when he-or, rather, his committee-reports.” Publication is expected around Easter.
