Terrorism Libel A Growing Business In England

The Sydney Morning Herald (HT: Campus Watch) brings us stats from Britain’s defamation court:

There has also been a nice bit of growth in terrorism-related libel actions in London. Nowadays terrorism libel cases make up 13 per cent of the total number of reported claims, compared with 4 per cent in the previous year and 6 per cent in the year before that.

As in the Ehrenfeld case, terror enablers are increasingly taking advantage of British courts to intimidate publishers and authors. The Sydney Morning Herald, also reviews some of the attempts to do so in the U.S.

The news report ends on a hopeful note for sanity to prevail in England.

But some good can come of these litigious struggles. Last year the House of Lords decided in a case also involving claims about funding terrorism and brought by a Saudi businessman, Mohammed Jameel, against The Wall Street Journal, that if journalism was undertaken in a responsible, balanced and thorough manner it would win the day. The court said that standard should be applied in a practical and flexible manner.

Sooner of later we'll have a High Court that will adopt the same sort of thinking.

As I discussed in the above Ehrenfeld case post, the New York legislature and U.S. Congress, also, should make clear that “libel tourism” cases will not be allowed to silence Americans’ First Amendment freedoms.