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AhabsOtherLeg wrote:Hiya Stefano. Good topic, this, and a good cause. I'll sign it a couple of times.
It seems that the press 'super-injunctions' are soon to be ended, which will be one heavy step on the road to freedom, but the libel laws and D-notices are probably going to persist for a while.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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