High Court in Britain Loosens Strict Libel Law
By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 12, 2006
LONDON, Oct. 11 — Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday for the first time that journalists have the right to publish allegations about public figures, as long as their reporting is responsible and in the public interest.
The ruling, a unanimous judgment by the Law Lords, is a huge shift in British law and significantly improves journalists’ chances of winning libel cases in a court system that until now has been stacked against them.
English judges have traditionally been so sympathetic to libel plaintiffs that many people from abroad have sued in English courts — even if the publications in question have tiny circulations here — because they have had a much better chance of winning here than at home.
Newspaper editors said the decision, in the case of Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, would free them to pursue stories vigorously without constant fear of lawsuits.
“This will lead to a greater robustness and willingness to tackle serious stories, which is what the judges said they wanted,” said Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. Until now, he said in an interview, newspapers have had to police themselves to the point where “stories weren’t getting in the paper or were being neutered by clever lawyers who knew how to play the game.”
The case concerned an article published on Feb. 6, 2002, in The Wall Street Journal and in its European edition, The Wall Street Journal Europe, which has a daily circulation of 18,000 in Britain.
The article said that at the request of the United States, Saudi Arabia was monitoring bank accounts of prominent Saudi businesses and individuals to trace whether they were being used, possibly unwittingly, to siphon money to terrorist groups.
One of the businesses mentioned, Abdul Latif Jameel Company Ltd., sued the newspaper, as did Muhammed Abdul Latif Jameel, its general manager and president. Under British libel law, newspapers being sued are required to prove the truth of the allegations they print — the opposite of the situation in the United States, where the burden of proof falls heavily on plaintiffs.
But that was a practical impossibility in this case, a member of the panel that ruled on Wednesday, Lord Hoffmann, wrote in his decision.
“In the nature of things, the existence of surveillance by the highly secretive Saudi authorities would have been impossible to prove by evidence in open court,” he said. The paper argued that the article was in the public interest — that is, important to the debate about terrorism and the authorities’ efforts to combat it.
A court ruling in a case several years ago involving The Times of London first seemed to open the door to such an argument. But that decision set out what some lawyers say was a prohibitively high set of standards for newspapers and other news media to meet, forcing them to defend their reporting practices to satisfy the subjective opinions of individual English judges.
In the Jameel case, a lower court jury rejected The Journal’s public-interest argument, finding that the article was defamatory. The Journal was ordered to pay £40,000 — or about $74,000 — in damages. An appeals court affirmed the ruling.
The Law Lords overturned the decision. In a ringing rebuke to the lower court judge’s conclusion that the article was not in the public interest, in part because it flouted an agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia to keep the monitoring program secret, Lord Hoffmann declared it to be “a serious contribution in measured tone to a subject of very considerable importance.”
Another member of the panel, Lord Scott of Foscote, defended the right of news organizations to publish material deemed private by the government.
“It is no part of the duty of the press to cooperate with any government, let alone foreign governments, whether friendly or not, in order to keep from the public information of public interest the disclosure of which cannot be said to be damaging to national interests,” he wrote.
A third member, Baroness Hale of Richmond, wrote, “We need more such serious journalism in this country, and our defamation law should encourage rather than discourage it.”
Keith Mathieson, a partner specializing in media law at the firm of Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, said the ruling would make it easier for newspapers to rely on confidential sources, as long as the articles were responsibly reported and in the public interest.
“It should make it easier for newspapers in the U.K. to publish serious stories where they cannot prove that allegations are true,” he said in an interview.
Stuart Karle, The Wall Street Journal’s general counsel, said that the newspaper had spent millions of dollars on the case and that the decision represented an important turning point. “The history of English libel law was that essentially no decision was final in a newsroom until a judge, several years later, agreed with you,” he said in an interview.
“Going forward,” he said, “this decision means that if you’re a quality news organization you can fully and fairly cover the important issues of the day without this nagging problem of having a libel judge in London basically engage in an autopsy of every single thing you did and decide whether he agrees with your editorial judgment.”
available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/world/europe/12britain.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
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