Wednesday, March 17, 2010

More libel law madness

I've written several times about how the English libel laws need to change.
It is still a work in progress with a lot of pressure being put on British MPs to sign EDM 423, but for some reason there's still some who refuses to sign it.


More madness
What I'm going to post about today is something I was made aware of on twitter (before hearing about it on national news).

A Saudi representative for more than 90000 descendants of Muhammad, is suing 11 Danish newspapers that published the the Muhammad cartoons back in 2006.
And of course this is taking place in the crazy English libel courts.

But apparently the Danish Minister of Justice (Lars Barfoed), and therefore the Danish government, have complained to the EU about the fact that British libel laws are being used to stifle the freedom of speech in Denmark (Danish news).
Hopefully the government will keep pushing the EU as well as the Brits, who responded that they are aware that British laws are damaging rights in other EU nations (Danish news).
This could at least help put an end to the libel tourism. And hopefully put pressure on the British MPs to change the libel laws completely.

(Thanks to Simon Singh and Jumile for the Tweets)


My rant
This is just absolutely insane.
Freedom-crushing draconian libel laws from one nation, used by a person from a second country to sue a newspaper in a third country.
How can anyone even remotely sane argue that the English libel laws are correctly implemented?
The British MPs must work towards changing these laws to be in line with similar laws from other nations and the EU must re-evaluate they implementation of inter-EU libel law jurisdictions.


If you haven't done so yet, please help by signing the libel reform petition.

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