Questions for the Impress Project, part II
Thinking more about the Impress initiative, I think the main issue with the idea of a ‘Leveson compliant’ regulator is that Sir Brian’s principles might not be the most appropriate way to solve the...
View ArticleFree Speech, Offence, and Maajid Nawaz
Maajid Nawaz, the author of Radical and the Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, has been at the centre of a controversy this week, after he tweeted a image...
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Defending Free Speech for the Far Right
I had fifteen seconds of fame on Friday, defending the free expression of far right political groups. The anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate have called for Hungarian politician Gabor Vona to be...
View ArticleJail Verse: Poems from Kondengui Prison
The latest act of literary campaigning from English PEN is to publish Jail Verse: Poems from Kondengui Prison by Enoh Meyomesse. Enoh has been an opposition activist in Cameroon for decades. In 2012 he...
View ArticleFree speech will suffer if politicians get tough on offensive tweets
I’ve had another article published on Comment is Free—this time about social media prosecutions and the tougher prison sentences that MPs want to introduce to punish those who send threatening messages...
View ArticlePutin is sanitising the voice of ordinary Russians
Vladimir Putin has this week signed into a law some measures to ban swearing in films, books and music. Films with obscene content will not be granted a distribution certificate and exisiting books...
View ArticleUKIP’s muddled sense of free expression
In a recent press release, Janice Atkinson, a UKIP candidate for the European Parliament, calls on the police to prosecute Hope Not Hate and Unite Against Fascism protesters under ‘hate crime’...
View ArticleCanaries down the free speech mine
On Tuesday I was quoted in a Belfast Telegraph report on the rise of super-injunctions in Northern Ireland. Super-injunctions, you will recall, are those special types of gagging-order where the judge...
View ArticleHacked Off: Unwitting support for self-censorship?
There was some controversy last month surrounding free speech group Index on Censorship. They’ve appointed Steve Coogan as a patron, but he is famously a part of the Hacked Off campaign which supports...
View ArticleQuoted in the Guardian, demanding free speech for the publishers of Belarus
From Wednesday, a Guardian report about the legal harassment of radical publisher Ihar Lohvinau: English PEN slammed the law introduced in Belarus in 2013 for the licensing of publishers, calling it “a...
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