Section 14

There’s debate going on at Not PC over the arrest of Anzac Day protesters in Wellington.

As today’s Dominion Post editorial points out, the Anzac’s sacrifice ensured that we have the freedom to offend. However, the paper takes no stand on the arrests saying the legality of the protesters’ methods are now a matter for the courts.

Phil at Pacific Empire, who was at the Anzac service where the Peace Action protest occurred, blogged his thoughts and explained why he believes the arrests were justified.

The protesters unfurled anti-war banners, burned a New Zealand flag and sounded a horn during one of the speeches. Two of them were arrested. The question under debate at Not PC is whether the arrests of the protesters violated their right to free speech. Note that none of the ten or fifteen protesters who simply held a banner and shouted were arrested.

Phil says that “loudly disrupting the speeches and lighting a fire in a public place does not constitute free speech.” PC notes that the arrest was for disorderly behaviour and is no more a restriction of free speech than having your stereo shut down at 3am because it’s keeping the neighbours awake.

Commenter Matt B believes that the 3am noise control analogy doesn’t hold because of the political content of the “speech” and that the arrest “implies a low and arbitrarily-applied threshold for state intervention in expressing an opinion”.

So were the actions disorderly enough and was the speech content low enough to justify the arrests?

Did the sounding of the horn during Graham Fortune’s speech constituted an act of force, “noise pollution”, or did its expressive content warrant protection? It’s very tempting to let my disgust at the protesters push me into looking for an excuse to justify the arrests and then back-engineering a reason. On consideration I don’t think that this act alone warranted an arrest. When there’s doubt, the law should err on the side of freedom of expression. (On the other hand, if an old soldier who lost friends defeating tyranny slugged one of the rent-a-mobbers it would have made me happy inside.)

The second matter, flag burning, has been recognised as protected (if ineloquent) political speech in many places. In New Zealand, a flag burning conviction has been overturned as inconsistent with the bill of rights. The only question relevant to the prosecution is not the political content of the expression but the safety of setting fire to anything in a crowd.

Your thoughts? Where’s the line?

18-year old Chicago high school student Allan Lee was arrested last week and charged with disorderly behaviour for writing a violent essay for his creative writing class. Lee has since had his enlistment contract with the Marines revoked because of the charges.

The essay mimicked the content of a violent video game but contained no threats against anyone.

Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho wrote a series of violent plays that came to light after his massacre. The Cary-Grove school board has now massively overreacted, crushing rights as it goes, and criminalised this form of expression. Trying to deal with some of the actual violence that goes on in American schools would be a better idea that making handing in homework a criminal offence.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

And you’d better not forget it if you live in one of several American states that are implementing “veggie libel” or agricultural disparagement laws.

Under California’s proposed Assembly Bill 698 it will become illegal to say bad things about perishable agricultural products unless you hcan prove scientifically that your claims are true. Bills of this type introduce the same sort of rules for vegetables that currently exist for people as defamation laws.

There’s a huge amount of rubbish talked about food safety by various consumer and environmental groups and food producers claim that this can affect their incomes. The veggie libel laws got their start with the 1989 Alar scare, which suggested (once you trawled through the actual data) that people who consumed 20,000 litres or more of apple juice per day were liable to contract cancer. Apple growers claimed the affair cost them $100 million in lost sales but they lost a libel suit against CBS, who first aired the story.

Critics claim that the laws will be used to chill criticism of the food industry. In one case dairies were sued for advertising that their milk was growth hormone-free and thus implying that growth hormones are bad. The chilling effect occurs when the threat of a lawsuit prevents someone from expressing an opinion - even if they believe it to be true and have evidence to back it up - because they can’t afford to defend a lawsuit. These lawsuits (known in America as SLAPPs - “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation”) have also caused publishers to back away from books because a book’s sales wouldn’t justify the legal costs, even if the case was won.

People behind food scares (and environmental scares more generally) can often be reckless with regard to the truth but it would be wrong to place a blanket ban on their utterings. The reputation of a vegetable should not have the same standing in law as the reputation of a person. This attempt can only be an act of professional courtesy on the part of California legislators.

The answer as usual is to have the debate in public, infuriating and tiring as that may be; to examine the evidence and then to point out in public, as P.J. O’Rourke did, that the Alar scare was not a problem with apples but with Meryl Streep’s head.

Hat tip: National Coalition Against Censorship.

The Greens, United Future, Act, and the Maori Party joined forces this afternoon to call for the repeal of New Zealand’s archaic sedition law, lending their support to the Law Commission’s report recommending the same.

“In a country that champions itself as a free and fair democracy the existence of sedition laws is an unnecessary restraint on the political rights of New Zealanders,” said the MPs.

“The problem we have with the law of sedition is that while it continues to exist in this country true freedom of expression is compromised.”

In the past, sedition laws have been used against Taranaki Maori leader Te Whiti in the wake of the Parihaka invasion, and against then-future Labour Prime Ministers Peter Fraser for opposing conscription during World War I and Walter Nash for importing communist propaganda. (No Right Turn has an index of sedition cases in New Zealand.)

More recently, Tim Selwyn was convicted of sedition for distributing pamphlets encouraging people to copy his axe attack on the Prime Minister’s office. This has sparked a rash of threats to prosecute for sedition for some extremely silly things.

Peter Dunne noted at this afternoon’s press conference that together the four parties had fifteen votes, making a majority in Parliament if either main party joined them.

Kudos to all involved, especially if they manage to get this law off the books. A few hours ago I would never have imagined that you put these four parties in the same room and expect anything sensible to come out but credit where credit’s due - this is a creditable move.

UPDATE 25/4/07: Idiot/Savant has set up a pledge at Pledgebank to write to the Minister of Justice urging the repeal of New Zealand’s sedition laws as long as 20 others do the same, so sign the pledge and get writing.

UPDATE 26/4/07: The pledge has collected the signatures needed to trigger it. Kudos to Idiot/Savant for relentlessly pushing for sedition law reform. If you signed the pledge, now’s the time to keep your end of the bargain and write that letter to Mark Burton to make sure we get the result we want. If you didn’t sign, you still can.

Thousands of Venezuelans filled the streets of Caracas on Saturday to protest President Hugo Chávez’s plans to shut down Radio Caracas Television (reported here in January).

RCTV is being closed down in revenge for its alleged support of a coup attempt against Chávez in 2002.

Speaking to Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, General Alberto Muller claimed that Venezuela has “as much freedom of expression as anywhere in the world”, although he later confirmed that he was using the authoritarian definition of freedom of expression - the freedom to say whatever you like as long as you don’t disagree.

The general also condemned those who confuse freedom of speech with political insults, which does not allow respectful dialogue and debate.

When you’re talking to a man holding a gun, you’d better make sure that your dialogue is respectful.

Hat tip: FP Passport.

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.”
- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, exiled Russian-American poet.

Librarian Janet Yanoshko has done us all a great favour and compiled an extensive list of banned and “challenged” books at Forbidden Library.

Most of the usual suspects are there for most of the usual reasons along with a few oddities. James and the Giant Peach apparently promotes drug use.

If your bookshelves are looking for a bit more zing, head over and see what takes your fancy.

The German bid to spread its holocaust denial laws across the entire European union has gone a step further, although in a watered-down form. The new law will make it an offence to deny or trivialise the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but only if the effect is to incite racial hatred or violence.

A Polish/Baltic attempt to have Stalin’s crimes covered was rejected as was, in a nod to candidate-hopeful Turkey, any mention of the Armenian genocide. Germany’s bid to ban Nazi iconography has also been dropped.

While it’s good that the law has been watered down, (my thoughts on the original proposal are here: German bid to spread fascism), it is still an entirely unwarranted limitation on freedom of speech. There are already laws against inciting violence and inciting hatred is nothing more than thoughtcrime.

On a related topic, Spiked has an essay (Turning society into Room 101) on the “pathologisation” of certain types of expression:

People are silenced because they are ‘in denial’ (of the Holocaust or climate change), or because they’re ‘phobic’ (whether Islamophobic or homophobic), or because they spread ‘hate speech’ (they’re consumed by irrational hatred). All of these new censorious categories – denial, phobia, hatefulness – speak to the pathologisation of certain ideas. Speech is increasingly depicted as a sickness, and censorship as the cure.

Hat tip: Kiwiblog.

Submitters on Auckland City Council’s billboard ban should be congratulated for their overwhelming rejection of the city’s plans to regulate commercial speech. It remains to be seen whether the council will take any notice or whether the consultation process is as much of a farce as any of us suspect.

Meanwhile, in those parts of the third world that Auckland is trying to emulate, similar bans have already gone into effect. The city of São Paulo banned outdoor advertising from January 1st this year. Tony de Marco has posted a set of images on Flickr documenting the change and it feels slightly creepy - like some 1950s film where you wake up one morning and everyone’s disappeared.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

UPDATE 20/4/07: Compare this to Shanghai, where they know how to advertise. Jakob Montrasio posted this picture on Flickr showing a 420 metre high Windows Vista advertisement. Sadly, not something that would be possible in the People’s Republic of Auckland.

Hat tip: Passport.