One of the most basic rights available to those of us living in democracies is the right to freedom of speech, or freedom of expression. From this comes the right to vote, to report on events, to express our opinions, and to hold our leaders to account. Most, if not all, of us take this right for granted. And so we should. It is integral to our freedom in general.
The recent Trafigura debacle - where a previously little-known oil company used a notorious firm of libel lawyers to attempt to gag reports of a toxic waste dumping scandal - has reminded me how precarious this right is. And I'm not just talking about big companies using their financial muscle to (hilariously fail to) overturn 300-year-old laws just to cover up their own wrongdoing, which is egregious and heinous in itself, but that this sorry episode is just one small part of an increasing movement by various interests to restrict individual rights as part of their own agenda. It helps if you make annual profits of US$400million plus, so you can afford lawyers like this.
In the UK, we now have "super-injunctions", as used in the Trafigura case, where an injunction can be sought not only to prevent (say) a newspaper reporting on toxic waste dumping - but also that the same newspaper is not allowed to report on the injunction itself. This Kafkaesque moebius-strip of logic means that there may well be thousands of super-injunctions preventing what most people would consider public interest stories being released... and we're not even allowed to know about the injunctions themselves. As Richard Littlejohn might say, if he ever did any research - "you couldn't make it up".
As a Brit, I envy the United States somewhat, in that their rights and freedoms are clearly written down in a Bill of Rights and a Constitution - in contrast with the mishmash of common law that we have. The First (and by implication, therefore, the most important) Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America reads thus:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Now obviously there need to be restrictions on the right to freedom of speech - and there are. No reasonable person would say that you have the right to be offensive, and to provoke violence and hatred, for example. And a US case from 1925 states that this freedom does not allow persons to use words which "by their very nature, involve danger to the public peace and to the security of the state." Seems fair enough, doesn't it.
Here's an example. The US Supreme Court is currently considering a case where a man sold videos of pitbulls fighting. The man got three years in jail for animal cruelty (although Fox News still calls him a "dog lover"), but still has the right to free speech - and this, his lawyers contend, even extends to his hateful videos. Personally I consider this bizarre and incredible - but it does demonstrate how precious this right to freedom of speech is to Americans.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered the other side of this story. I remember the stories last year about how Sarah Palin tried to have books banned from Wasilla library. But that's Sarah Palin - she kerrrazy. Surely this sort of paranoid madness isn't that common. Americans are way too keen on their freedoms - aren't they?
So this is what Trafigura reminded me of. The utter nonsense of trying to suppress a story so much that you end up trampling on a 300-year-old law (and shooting yourself in the foot in the process), brought to mind another recent story that I had to read twice, it was so unbelievable.
You see, it's not just children's books about gay penguins that people want banned. Oh no. It's really serious hardcore stuff. Like Harry Potter. Or that dangerous revolutionary Philip Pullman. Stuff that millions of normal kids read. I mean, it's got so bad, that America now has a Banned Books Week.
I know.
America. Land of the Free. Banned Books Week.
WTF? It's THAT bad?? Shouldn't they be banning Jeffrey Archer first?
Don't they know this kind of stuff almost always backfires? Haven't they heard of the Streisand Effect? Or are these people (whoever they are) so blinded by hatred, intolerance, greed or whatever motivation they have, that they'll gladly ride into the valley of death to attempt to restrict the freedoms they claim to hold so dear?
Who are these people? Isn't it rather scary that some people are willing to go to such great lengths to stop other people reading words?
Some of them are companies with deep pockets who don't want us to know what they've been up to. Some of them are religious fundamentalists (y'know, the kind that seriously think Obama is the antichrist) wanting to impose their intolerant morality on the rest of us.
But ALL of them are dangerous. And if we don't stand up to them now, what price will we pay for our freedom in future? We cannot afford to live in a society where you can buy silence, or obtain it by threats. And surely we don't want to live in a world when harmless children's books are banned, while stories of vital public interest are quietly buried. Do we? The question is - can we afford the lawyers?
This is a slightly amended version of a blog post originally uploaded on 15 October, and (ironically) taken down on 16 October
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