100 Apologies on Twitter in Malaysia Defamation Case

Malaysian courts have given a modern take on being forced to repeatedly chalk up your misdemeanors on the classroom blackboard, Bart Simpson stylee.

He is spreading the apologies over the next three days and in accordance with the court order is typing by hand the hundred tweets which must come from his own account.

Fahmi Fadzil  has been ordered to apologize 100 times on Twitter, after tweeting to his mates that a pregnant friend of his wasn’t being treated particularly well by her employer – Female Magazine.

It’s yet another example of how people are starting to be held legally accountable for the utter guff they bleat on the internet, and to be honest I rather like it as a solution – it befits the absurdity of the transgression, which really just amounts to ‘talking bollocks’.

I rather hope that all the people who were tweeting various rumours about who had taken out superinjunctions and why, or tweeting spurious claims about Obama’s birthplace, will soon receive court orders ordering them to tweet ‘sorry guys, I’m full of shit’ a few hundred times.

No word from anyone’s legal representation on who suggested the terms. At this moment, Fahmi Fadzil has 76 apologies left to tweet.

In Defense of the Burkha Ban

By Elliot Adams

France’s far-right appeasing Burkha ban has been writ in law for a while now, though it hasn’t been enforced and there has been some further political wrangling over just what the law means for France.

If you’ve managed to miss this part of Sarkozy‘s scheme to win the support of fools and fascists, it constitutes a full ban on covering the face in public – with the exception of people wearing motorcycle helmets and attending festivals. This is bad news for protesters, scarf-fanciers and people with excessive facial hair, but the main thrust of this attack is against muslim women who choose to wear the Niqab, Burkha or the Snood.

Now this sounds like an idiotic idea the 1st, 2nd and 99th time you hear it – but give it that magic 100th chance. You should do so because, properly enforced, it also means a ban on these fuckers;

The minarets of Disneyland’s castle represent the greater threat to western culture

When they’re not peddling cheap plastic child-silencers with the Disney brand’s formidable pester power, sexualising children or indoctrinating them with the many questionable ethical lessons of their films and characters, Disney are just busy being hella’ creepy.

With this new law we can hope that Disneyland Paris will be depopulated of its grotesque denizens. These tortured chimeras are victims too though, they cannot speak(their mouths stuffed with blackened gauss) and they cannot leave the confines of their phantasmagorical realm. As Sarkozy said, “We cannot accept … prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and quite rightly so, I can only assume he was thinking of the creatures in the ghetto of Disneyland Paris, their curse is to forever shamble through unreal streets with permanent smiles stretched over their faces and their unmoving dead eyes glaring for the next child to ensnare.

Disney's advertising publicly sexualises children, Burkhas publicly desexualise women - I think the former is worse.

Disney raises the West’s children, championing the bland and the insipid, replacing parenting with a multimedia feast of bright colours and unimaginative stories of outdated morality.

Disney is a bigger threat to Western culture than any act of religious devotion and this new law would strike a mighty blow against its heart of darkness in Disneyland paris – if I had my way Cinderella would be dragged from her home and shot behind the chemical sheds, but more moderate voices prevail for now. That is why the Burkha ban should have our support, only perhaps we should rename it to recognise our real enemy – henceforth it shall be known as ‘The Magic Kingdom Final Solution’.

Ready to be shipped to Paris at a moments notice.

We must of course make an example of their leader, Mickey ‘lord of the woods’ Mouse. Construction has already begun on his means of dispatch, to be placed in Place du Carrousel where the Parisian guillotine once sat.

Officials insist the Burkha ban is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. By that logic however I would be unsurprised, though horrified, to see the suggestion of new laws prohibiting the possession of a yarmulhah, or the wearing of a crucifix. But I can hold out hope for the outlawing of oversized mouse ears and *shudder* child-like glee.

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Let's make it happen France, be cheese-eating victory monkeys. (Image: Unknown)

In Libel Law it’s No Win, No Fee or No Chance

By Elliot Adams

Standard Anti-Libel Lawsuit Disclaimer: For legal reasons, everything I say in the following post is a lie, a fictionalisation or possibly a freeform poem. Rubbing in whatever magical creams and rhino horn extracts I happen to mention in the next few paragraphs absolutely does have the amazing curative powers its manufacturers claim. ‘Homoeopathic medicine’ is legitimate and water does have a memory that can store the value of extracts boiled in it – and yet it has ‘forgotten’ all the faeces that’s been in it. No one has ever done or said what I claim they have, and no one is what I have said they are – not even myself. Also the yeti is real.

It’s sad to say it, but the preceding disclaimer was not entirely in jest. The Wilmshurst case, which has become a solid touchstone for our backwards Libel laws has – as is traditional in such cases – protected quacks and stifled debate. NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst is being sued by US medical devices corporation NMT over his comments made at an academic conference about the conduct and results of the MIST trial in which Wilmshurst was the lead investigator until problems arose with the safety of the tests – in two seperate proceedures the devices embolised into the patient’s heart.

At this point it’s important to recognise that he really was in the right making his comments. The results of the MIST trial were negative. The trial aimed to determine if the device permanently prevented migraines. A sample of 147 migraine sufferers took part, 73 had a fake operation with nothing implanted and 74 had NMT’s device implanted. Of these participants 6 people stopped suffering from migraine, 3 from each group. In scientific, mathematical and journalistic circles this is termed ‘making fuck-all difference’.

But such cases are common as Essex these days, so the real interest here lies in how this tiff is being funded. The Wilmshurst case would seem to be giving a rarely seen positive light to the use of Conditional Fee Agreements in libel cases.

CFAs were a labour brainchild and allow claimant lawyers to charge double to the losing side in order to compensate for the risk of failure in pursuing their claim. This is similar to the processes behind those often advertised ‘no-win, no-fee’ services which sue your friends, family or employers for your inability to carry out simple tasks without knackering yourself.

This isn’t of itself a problem, but when they’re used in libel cases, journalists are risking a loss in the millions if they take a libel case to trial and similarly ludicrous figures if they don’t settle almost immediately anyway. So even if a publication is clearly in the right they will have to settle because the high cost of potentially losing is a figurative gun to their head – or to their bank balances anyway.

In fact even if a publication wins in court, they will almost certainly lose financially because the claimant will rarely be able to pay the publications own legal costs.

Dr Wilmshurst, for example, has already paid a hundred thousand of his very own pounds in his defense. NMT have been ordered to put twice that amount in a UK bank account in case they lose at trial, or the case will be killed. But the company’s current financial situation is such that this is unlikely to happen. So even if Wilmshurst wins or the libel case is struck off, he may never get his hundred grand back. But the point is that, had Dr Wilmshurst’s Lawyer not taken on the case with a CFA, these demands wouldn’t have been made of NMT and he would’ve had barely any chance to defend his reputation at all.

The tory-judas coalition will be putting its Libel Reform Bill out to consultation next summer, so I think that perhaps cases like Wilmshurst’s should remind us that CFAs aren’t the heart of the problem. Certainly, libel costs currently present serious problems, but it is the harshness of current libel laws and the underlying cost that is problematic. The adjustments to those costs by CFAs can exacerbate these issues, but elliminating CFAs is not a solution and would create a funding vacuum where only the extremely wealthy can afford to defend their – deserved or undeserved – reputations.

Kurdish Journalist Receives 166 Years in Prison and a Press Freedom Award

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By Elliot Adams

Chamber of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, but without a free press it should not be called democratic (Image: Ankaralı Turgut)

Turkey has a culturally ingrained history of censorship and has long ignored the European Convention of Human Rights, of which it is a signatory, over the imprisoning of many journalists for reporting news concerning Turkish Kurdistan* and other ‘crimes of opinion’.

This has of course attracted sustained criticism, especially in light of Turkey’s continued pursuit of accession to the European Union. For example, the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIoJ) has sent a protest to the London Turkish ambassador in response to the treatment of Verdat Kursun, former editor of the Kurdish daily newspaper, Azadiya Welat.

Kursun had already served 13 months in prison for publishing articles that mention the PKK – this was seen as both glorifying criminals and “helping and abetting the PKK organisation by spreading propaganda” . He is being prosecuted for 32 additional charges related to the publishing of such articles, the total prison sentence for which would be 525 years.

The newspaper he formerly edited has been temporarily banned in direct opposition to the freedom of the press. Over the past four years, six successive chief editors of the newspaper have either been imprisoned or have had to flee Turkey to avoid arrest.

John Szemerey, chairman of the International Division of the CIoJ, wrote that “it is the function of the media to inform its readers of news, without fear or favour.” He points out that the PKK is seen by many in Turkish Kurdistan as a freedom movement and, though outlawed, still a influential political force. So no Kurdish publication or broadcaster would be credible if it did not report on the activities and policies of the PKK.

Szemerey, who is also the CIoJ’s representative in Brussels, warned the ambassador that Turkey’s lack of a free press and its imprisoning of

Turkey began negotiations for full EU membership in 2005, but it will be well over a decade before they could potentially join. (Image: Batuhan Aksu)

journalists will “make it impossible for the countries of the EU to admit Turkey to membership.” As freedom of the media and freedom of speech are both integral to the European Convention of Human Rights.

Such judicial harassment of journalists is facilitated by a range of repressive legislation, mostly imposed by the military junta after its 1980 coup. These have variously banned communist ideas, separatist propaganda, denigration of Turkishness, speech in a language forbidden by law and possible threats to public order – but these can be, and have been, made to fit whatever report or article that has irritated the wrong people.

Under external pressure the government has reworded many of these laws, but only in the most superficial way. For instance, article 301, the law that has perhaps put away the most journalists, has been modified to now punish “denigration of the Turkish nation”, rather than “denigration of Turkishness.” This of course amounts to exactly the same thing in the eyes of prosecutors and writers will continue to be arrested for mentioning historical and socio-political facts that do not portray Turkey or Turkish politicians in the most positive light.

But there is at least one positive development, the established media within Turkey seem to have finally come down in full support of people like Verdat Kursun. The journalist, who has already been sentenced to a total of 166 years in prison, has been awarded a prestigious press freedom prize by the Journalists Association of Turkey. On the same day, Irfan Aktan, editor of the Fortnightly Express, was also awarded a Journalists Association of Turkey prize. Aktan is currently serving a 15 month sentence for reporting on the PKK. Kursun’s father received the award on his son’s behalf, saying “Defend everyone’s right to freedom of thought. Today, unfortunately, this prize is going to prison.”

The drive to censor Turkey’s media is not slowing down, only this July the government adopted new resolutions on TV news broadcasts. One of which told television executives that they had a duty to avoid broadcasting “programmes, interviews or statements that appear to justify terrorist actions or are likely to be interpreted as propaganda on behalf of people … encouraging future attacks.” Something of a implicit threat urging news providers to self-censor and one that the Contemporary Association of Journalists warns is “likely to result in abuses.”

These resolutions, like the legislation that has come before them, are vague and open to interpretation. Combined with current anti-terrorism law, they provide the authorities with yet more powers for arbitrary prosecution of journalists.

But that at least one of the three main journalism organisations in Turkey has weighed in on the side of people like Kursun shows that the majority media is perhaps ready to start pushing back in defence of their colleagues in media that represents minorities like the Kurds.

It’s a obvious truism, but it is the first duty of the media to report the truth. For democracy to function journalists cannot turn a blind eye to organisations the government wishes to pretend don’t exist. Something that is recognised in the European Convention of Human Rights.

Turkey must ensure that it’s media is free to report the truth if it wishes to someday enter the European Union.

But regardless of Turkey’s negotiations with the EU, the only way to treat the people of your nation with the respect and dignity that every human deserves, is by respecting their right to have opinions and an identity that differs to yours. Deny them that and you deny them their humanity.

* It should be noted that Kurdistan is not a nation-state, rather it is a geo-cultural region wherein the Kurds form the majority population, and Kurdish culture, language, and identity have historically been based. Some groups like the PKK campaign for the autonomy of that area (sometimes in armed conflict), but most are pushing merely for recognition and equal rights for Kurdish people within the region.