Rachel Ehrenfeld: libel tourism bad

My apologies to the Heartless and Brainless readership. This article by Rachel Ehrenfeld on libel tourism in the USA is coming to you more than a tad late. I've been a bit behind in my blogging - indeed, all of my writing - over the past couple of days.

But the article is coming to you nonetheless. In the New York Daily News: Rescue writers from scourge of libel tourism:

Paul Williams has lived in Pennsylvania all his life. Yet with pretrial proceedings that begin today, Canadian libel laws now threaten to ruin him financially.
Williams is a National Book Award-winning writer whose 2006 éxposé, "The Dunces of Doomsday," revealed potential terrorist threats to the United States emanating from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Although the book was published only in the U.S., he's being sued for libel in Canada by the university, which is demanding an apology and $2 million in damages.

[...]

The same is true in Brazil, where Joseph Sharkey, a New Jersey-based freelance business columnist, is being sued for reporting about the aftermath of a plane crash he survived over the Amazon. The plaintiff is a woman who maintains Sharkey offended the "dignity" of Brazil by criticizing its incompetent air-traffic control. She is demanding $500,000 and a series of international apologies. Sharkey is likely to be convicted.
In 2005, Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz sued me for libel in London; in a heavily researched book, I had alleged that he funded Al Qaeda. Mahfouz was a one-man wrecking crew of Americans' free speech rights, who after 9/11 sued or threatened to sue dozens of American writers in plaintiff-friendly English courts. When Mahfouz came after me, I refused to acknowledge the British court, asserting my rights as a U.S. citizen. Nevertheless I was rendered a judgment by default and ordered to pay Mahfouz more than $250,000 and destroy the book.

[...]

Fortunately for Williams, Pennsylvania is represented by U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, who wrote and introduced the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009. The bill would protect American writers and publishers from foreign libel judgments rendered in countries lacking America's free speech protections.
New York was the first state to pass an anti-libel tourism law, with similar laws following in Florida and Illinois. But these patchwork protections don't do nearly enough. Congress needs to intervene.

( Again, you can read the whole article here. ) Now, this is just a humble movement from a humble blogger, but let me add a whole-hearted second to Rachel's cry for Congressional intervention. I'm not an American, but it seems to me that, instead of the current ideological morass currently gumming up the works in Congress, a mere matter of defending the right to freedom of speech of American citizens from foreign interests might seem like a walk in the park. Certainly it's not outside of the realm of reason: I'm not even sure how such a thing could be opposed without diving into the realm of censorious stupidity.

By the way, the threat of libel tourism should be nothing new to this blog's readers. My counterpart Byron Tau, sadly missing from the H&B roster these days, has written a little something on the issue before.