Posted on 02/15/2009 6:23:34 AM PST by Sammy67
A House committee held an important hearing Thursday morning on the issue of "libel tourism." That's the practice of bringing libel suits against American authors in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where First Amendment protections do not apply and where the burden of proof is placed on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff.
Saudi Arabian businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz has brought several such lawsuits, winning a default judgment against American researcher Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, and forcing a Cambridge University Press to destroy copies of the book Alms for Jihad.
Both works linked bin Mahfouz to financing terrorism.
U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) submitted written testimony for the
(Excerpt) Read more at investigativeproject.org ...
Rep. King is the beacon of sanity in a very liberal state...
I hope this bill becomes law....the fact that an American can have their First Amendment right stripped by a judge in another country is nothing but Fascism masked as Globalism.
If they can go after books...then what is next? The Internet? Free Republic posts?
Exactly.
It’s not 1770. We do not have to answer to British courts anymore.
BTTT
Bump for Monday reading
Their first amendment rights are perfectly preserved in America. What is happening here is the laws of other nations are being used to limit their freedom in those other nations. The side-effect is that the author is tarnished by the judicial decision. This, of course, is not what those other nation’s laws were designed to do, but this is what can happen in the globalist environment we have now.
You do if you are in Britain. Neither your US citizenship, nor your US passport, nor your US embassy will protect you if you break another countries laws when you are in that country.
The author was not in England. His books were shipped to England and sold there.
That said, I don’t know how much good any US law will do to change British laws.
Yes but his books that are being sold in England are subject to English common law, the same way that an English author’s books sold in the US would be subject to US Federal and/or State law.
IN reality we are probably far more dependent on the murderous Saudis than we ever were on the malevolent graces of the british crown.
Rush mentioned Peter King today, but I didn’t catch what it was about. Maybe it was this.
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