AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Stephen Morgan wrote:Super-injunctions aren't normally needed, a quick letter from a lawyer will scare most people into silence. There's no legal aid in a libel case and people don't want to be bankrupted.
That's true, and the coalition are in the process of tightening the restrictions on eligiblity for legal aid right across the board - soon it won't just be the defendants in libel cases who will have to worry about being bankrupted in their own defence, especially if they are facing a powerful or lawyered-up person/entity in court.
Not just defendants. If you're poor and being denied benefits unjustly, say, or being mistreated by your landlord, or your bank, or anyone else you need to seek legal redress against, you won't be able to. If, say, you want to sue Nadhmi Auchi for calling you a liar, as the original defendants in the McLibel case sued McDonalds for calling them liars during the course of the original proceedings, you won't be able to. The law won't any longer protect those most in need of protection.
Super-injunctions are still used, though, and when they are taken out pre-emptively, as in the Trafigura case, effectively barring our own newspapers from reporting on questions asked in our Parliament, they are an affront to our supposed democracy.
They can't prevent reporting of parliamentary questions, they can however stop questions being asked in Parliament. The only reason we've ever heard of Trafigura is because the super injunction was so super it was recorded without the name of the plaintiff in the records, so when the Parliamentary clerks looked through to see if the question was sub judice they didn't think it was, and allowed it to be asked. If they'd been a bit more thorough the question wouldn't have been asked and couldn't have been reported. But super injunctions are a sign of weakness. If you're really powerful you call up the editor, if you're quite powerful you have your lawyer send a letter, if you're a scandal-ridden footballer you get a super-injunction.
Even if they're not used very often, or by very many people, it'd still be better for everyone (except the mighty) if they didn't exist, and had never existed. That goes for Carter Ruck as well, come to think of it.
Schillings also.
Stephen Morgan wrote:That's why Nadhmi Auchi can silence people saying he's a convicted fraudster (he is, in fact, a convicted fraudster who was convicted of fraud in a fully legal court of the type which normally convicts fraudsters when they commit fraud).
I hadn't heard of him, shamefully enough, though I remember hearing about the Elf Acquitaine (Total) scandal at the time, kind of in the background (was still at school). I think you must be mistaken, though, as there is no mention of a fraud conviction on his Wikipedia entry!
There's an older version in the wiki history which has this:
In 2003, Auchi was convicted of fraud following his involvement in a €350m corruption scandal centred around the French oil company Elf Aquitaine, described as "the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since the second world war".[5][6] Auchi was given a €2m fine, along with a 15 month suspended jail sentence, for his involvement in the 1991 purchase by Elf Aquitaine of various Spanish oil refineries and petrol stations, having been accused by prosecutors of funnelling 1.4bn pesetas of illegal commissions back to the Elf executives who had initially set up the deal.[7]
Following the verdict, Elf (by now merged with TotalFina and re-named Total) decided to take legal action against Auchi in France; Auchi responded by suing Total for £200m in turn, this time in the UK.[8]
Quite a lively debate about it on the Discussion page though, and yup - he's a fraudster who committed a big fraud and got done for it and then convicted (for fraud). Nadhmi Auchi, I mean. Y'know, the fraudster.
Khalid bin Mahfouz, he of the funding of BCCI and the mujahideen, also sued some obscure American academic tomes on terror-funding in British courts. Libel tourism, as it's called, the practice of the global elites coming to Britain to sue people from elsewhere for libel. This tactic has succeeded in having a number of American books pulped, largely on the orders of bin Mahfouz, the silencing of a Ukrainian newspaper website, and so on. Supposedly this comes under British jurisdiction because a few Englishmen read each, ordering the American books from the American Amazon. Under EU law and the Common Law system, these judgements for damages and so forth can be enforced in America, Canada, and so on.
Stephen Morgan wrote:Stephen Fry is not only one of the faces on this libel law campaign, but he's standing by the conviction behind it as well. He's paid off the £1000 court-ordered fine of an unwitting Twitterer who said he was going to blow up Robin Hood airport because of it's rubbish staff (as a joke) and got arrested and charged for it.
Now there are thousands of Fry's followers on Twitter all saying they're going to blow up Robin Hood airport just to test the limits of free speech.
This is an anti-terror law abuse, not a libel law abuse.
It's still about freedom of speech and expression - or rather, about the limits
of the limits that can be placed on it. I don't mind him being opposed to the abuse of two separate sets of laws. He can even be opposed to three (or more) if he wants.[/quote]
Well, as he's a national treasure, I suppose so.
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 11:19 am