The Times Higher Education Supplement reports the promising news:
A Liberal Democrat peer is to launch a libel reform bill in the House of Lords that would offer greater protection for scientific debate against defamation claims.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill said he was introducing the private member’s bill in order to encourage the government to act quickly on libel reform. He said his aim was to trigger the formation of a committee to take detailed evidence on the topic. He added that he hoped the government would adopt the final version of the bill.
Both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems made pre-election pledges to reform libel law in the wake of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s Press standards, privacy and libel report, which highlighted the current law’s potential to stifle scientific debate.
You can read the full story here.
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If doing this means that the HoL is up to speed on everything when it comes to a FoS bill, then it can only be good, hence I think that concentrating on just one specific area doesn’t really help that much. He should be encouraged to consider everything in the report and then the HoC can consider his recommendations “in total”.
This may take some pressure of the HoC, which is going to be immensely busy in the near future with all sorts of things.
For “scientific debate” read “evidence of blatant deception and lies by rich people”.
This really cannot come soon enough. The example I will continue trotting out until libel law is overhauled is when Vanity Fair printed an accusation that Roman Polanski had propositioned a woman whilst on his way to Sharon Tate’s funeral.
He sued in the British courts but, because he was on the run from the California justice system at the time (for jumping bail after raping a 13 year old girl), he could not travel to London where he’d have been arrested. It would have been perfectly reasonable to conclude that this was a man who had no reputation to defend, but Mr Justice Eady allowed him to appear by video link so to avoid the indignity of being arrested and transferred to US custody for something he had done.