"A chilly blast of censorship"

The last few days have seen a new case of a phenomenon I have written quite a lot about, viz. legal threats issued against bloggers. The Times reports:

One is a billionaire businessman and former prisoner from Uzbekistan who is the second largest shareholder in Arsenal Football Club.

The other is the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames Boris Johnson, who hopes to be Mayor of London.

In a chilly blast of censorship the lawyers of Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov yesterday stifled his arch enemy Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. But in the process, the ebullient Mr Johnson found himself silenced too.

The seemingly irrepressible Tory became an innocent victim of a bitter internet war between Mr Usmanov and Mr Murray.

Mr Usmanov’s libel lawyers Schillings have spent weeks warning websites and journalists about repeating Mr Murray’s blog allegations about their client’s past. Now the web server has cut off the former ambassador’s link to the wider world. Caught in the collateral damage are a host of opinion formers’ websites including Bloggerheads by Tim Ireland and the Sandwell Labour councillor Bob Piper.

Now, my knowledge of football is close to zero and my sympathy for Mr Murray's political campaigns is limited. I regard laws on defamation in England as absurdly biased towards the plaintiff but as nonetheless in some form a necessary part of public life. Moreover, in order to keep separate the issues of internet speech and the content of particular speech I have deliberately not read the allegations made against Mr Usmanov, and I wouldn't be able to judge their veracity even if I knew what they were. But I'm perfectly certain that this episode represents a gross intrusion into the rights of free expression. On that premise, I give Mr Murray my support.

I've commented before, in the context of the Mumsnet libel settlement, on the threat to free expression represented by libel laws that hold a publisher liable for the content of comments posted by a third party. The Usmanov case goes a step beyond even that disturbing state of affairs, for it has led to the closure of blogs that have nothing to do with the complaint. And in the case of the websites that the Usmanov complaint directly addresses, the threats are unconscionable. There has been a long discussion on this subject at Harry's Place, where Mr Murray has posted this comment:

The key point is that I stand by what I said and stand ready to justify it in a British court of law, and to call lots of witnesses to help me. I have made completely clear to Schillings that I am not running away and am ready for the legal case.

Schillings however, rather than sue me, have threatened and intimidated others into closing down websites, without ever the truth or falsity of the facts about Usmanov being tested in court. That is a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Yes, it is. I was invited by one of the news programmes on terrestrial television to discuss this issue on Friday evening, and I regret (and apologise to Mr Murray) that I wasn't able to do it. The issue of principle is important and needs airing, which is why I raise it here.

I should, however, to clear up any possible confusion, state what my interest in the subject is and what it is not. The invitation to discuss the subject on air came because I am, so far as I know, still the only British blogger ever to have received a libel writ. But, as my regular readers will know, there is no parallel whatever with the Usmanov case, and I do wish to stress this. The complainant in my case, an eccentric pro-Milosevic blogger called Neil Clark, was handicapped from the outset of his campaign to shut me up by the dual misfortune that (a) I could prove the truth of my comments about him, and consequently would not in any circumstances yield to his demands to censor myself, apologise to him and pay him damages; and (b) he was stupefyingly clueless. (I detail here, most recently, Clark's gross misrepresentation of source material and the ineptitude of his purported legal threats, which represented - and were instantly dismissed by the Court as - an abuse of the legal process. I regret to report that even after his unfortunate experience, in which - owing to my decision not to bill him for the costs of my legal representation - he escaped far more lightly than he might have done, Mr Clark imprudently reinforced his discomfiture by means of the stupidest Internet imposture I've ever seen.)

In short, my experience was close to a joke, if a somewhat laboured one. The legal expedients that are being practised in Craig Murray's case are no joke at all. With that distinction stressed and understood, I shall be glad to explain the grounds of my support for threatened bloggers to anyone who will listen, and in any forum.