cearta.ie – Page 121 – the Irish for rights

As the slow march towards a new Supreme Court for the UK nears its destination, the Times has a piece about its newly refurbished premises:

The United Kingdom’s new Supreme Court will open its doors for business on October 1, with the first inbuilt facilities in Britain for broadcasting in court. … Broadcasting and internet arrangements are still to be devised but the three courts (two for the Supreme Court, one for the judicial committee of the Privy Council) can be filmed, a first in England and Wales.

As the BBC story on the completion of the refurbishment emphasises, the “decision to televise events from inside the court’s three chambers is a first for England and Wales”. And the Guardian quotes Jenny Rowe, the Court’s Chief Executive as saying that they are “in advanced discussions with broadcasters about the material they will want to use … If broadcasters wish to show it we will make it available”.

I think that it is a splendid idea. As the Canadian blawgs Slaw and the Court point out, since February 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada has provided live streaming of oral arguments and judges’ questions in authorized cases. The whole experiment is working well, and doing the same in the UK is an excellent development.…

New Open Source Law Journal

15 July, 20098 August, 2009

| 3 Comments

| Cyberlaw, Legal Journals and Law Reviews, open access

The European Legal Network, a professional network of legal experts facilitated by the Freedom Task Force which promotes free software licensing as part of the work of the Free Software Foundation Europe, has just announced the launch of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review. It is a peer reviewed biannual journal for high-level analysis and debate about Free and Open Source Software legal issues, and it will receive financial and administrative support from the NLNet Foundation, which supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. Edited by Andrew Katz and Amanda Brock, its focus includes copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes. Unsurprisingly, it operates a strong Open Access Policy, providing immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Given recent developments relating to Creative Commons licences for Ireland, I was particularly taken by two pieces in the first issue discussing Jacobsen v Katzer and Kamind Associates 535 F.3d 1373 (Fed.Cir.2008) (pdf), in which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted a preliminary injunction to enforce the terms of the OSI‘s open source Artistic Licence (see JOLT | Lessig | OSI | Stanford CIS; Brian F Fitzgerald and Rami Olwan “The legality of free and open source software licences: the case of Jacobsen v.…

Traffic Data Retention, Irish-style, returns to the legislative agenda

13 July, 2009

| 4 Comments

| data retention, Digital Rights, ECHR, ECJ

The Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009, published last week, has caused a bit of a stir in this morning‘s newspapers. It will give effect to EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC of 15 March 2006 (blogged here) which recently survived challenge by the Irish Government in the European Court of Justice, and it will replace the radically misconceived and deeply flawed stop-gap Part 7 of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act, 2005 (also here) (blogged here).

In essence, the Bill requires telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and the like, to retain data about communications (though not the content of the communications); phone and mobile traffic data have to be retained for 2 years; internet communications have to be retained for one year. This is better than it could have been, in that the Directive would have allowed 2 years for all traffic data; but it is a lot worse than the minimum of 6 months allowed by the Directive. This will impose significant costs on those obliged to retain and secure the data, and those costs will be passed on to their already hard-pressed customers. And it is likely to drive international telecommunications and internet companies to European states which have introduced far less demanding regimes.…

Legal Alchemy

13 July, 200923 October, 2012

| No Comments

| Irish Society, judges, Law, The Rule of Law

Albie Sachs is a remarkable man. His official bio begins

On turning six, during World War II, Albie Sachs received a card from his father expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.

He began that fight as a seventeen year old law student; as a lawyer, the bulk of his work involved defending people charged under apartheid’s racist and repressive security laws – many of them faced the death penalty. As a result he was harassed by the security police, detained in solitary confinement for two prolonged spells of detention, tortured by sleep deprivation, forced into exile in 1966, and in 1988 blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. In exile, he worked as an academic in the UK and Mozambique, campaigned for human rights and an end to apartheid, and thought deeply and wrote widely about the role of law as a protector of human dignity in the modern world. He wrote many of the ANC’s constitutional documents, helped to negotiate South Africa’s transition to constitutional democracy and to draft its post-apartheid Constitution, and was one of the founding judges of the Constitutional Court in 1994.…

So am I?

12 July, 200910 July, 2009

| No Comments

| General

Via Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ blog, I came across this video from the Society for Geek Advancement:

…

The template for journalism?

11 July, 200910 December, 2012

| 1 Comment

| Blasphemy, Defamation, Defamation Bill 2006, journalism, Press Council

A Leader in today’s Irish Times welcomes the passing of the Defamation Bill, 2006, and argues that it will set an appropriate template for the practice of journalism in Ireland:

The template for journalism

The Defamation Bill has concluded its passage through the Oireachtas, with a few deserved wobbly moments on blasphemy, and now awaits the signature of President McAleese. It will set the template for the practise of journalism in the years ahead. …

The new regime for journalism will operate on twin pillars. The Bill attempts – quite successfully – a balancing of constitutional rights: between the public’s right to know and the citizen’s right to a good name. … The concession to the practise of journalism is the new defence of “reasonable publication” allowing newspapers to publish stories of public importance for the public benefit if they can be shown to have been thoroughly investigated and done in good faith – even if allegations made in them turn out to be untrue.

The quid pro quo for these changes is the Office of Press Ombudsman and an independent Press Council which are given legal privilege for their findings in the Bill. These offices give readers a formal and free complaints system which has been in operation for more than a year.

…

Defamation Bill passed by the Seanad

10 July, 200914 July, 2009

| 1 Comment

| Blasphemy, Defamation, Defamation Bill 2006

Having been passed by the Dáil (lower house of parliament) earlier this week, today’s papers are full of the news that the Defamation Bill, 2006 was passed yesterday by the Seanad (upper house of parliament) (the full debate is here); all that is now required for it to become law is the signature of the President.

However, even at this late stage, there was still time for another twist on the Bill’s sinuous route into law. From the front page of this morning’s Irish Times:

Defamation Bill stumbles through Seanad after lost vote

The Government lost a vote in the Seanad yesterday on the Defamation Bill but managed to salvage the legislation by calling for a walk-through vote which gave enough time for two missing Senators to be found.

The Government defeat came on an amendment to the Bill proposed by Senator Eugene Regan of Fine Gael proposing to delete the provision in the legislation making blasphemy a crime.

In an electronic vote whereby Senators press a button, the Government was defeated by 22 votes to 21 in the 60-member upper house.

However, Fianna Fáil whip Diarmuid Wilson immediately requested a walk-through vote which takes about 10 minutes to complete.

…

Pleading defamation defences

9 July, 200911 July, 2009

| No Comments

| Defamation, Irish cases

In a recent post, I discussed newspaper reports of a recent High Court case in which Quinn Insurance Group lost a High Court bid to strike out parts of the Sunday Tribune’s defence to forthcoming libel proceedings taken against it by the insurance company; and I promised to return to the case as soon as a full report of the judgment became available online. I can now make good on that promise, as the judgment is available here and here. It turned on the question of how much detail must be pleaded before trial by a defendant claiming that an alleged defamation was either true or covered by qualified privilege.

Relying on an internal and confidential Garda (police) memorandum, the Sunday Tribune alleged that senior Gardaí had been recruited by Quinn to investigate insurance claims being made against it, and that the Gardaí not only relayed detailed information to Quinn, but also offered bonuses or sweetners to solicitors on behalf of plaintiffs to recommend early settlements in cases or claims against Quinn. The paper characterised this as “a scandalous subversion of garda independence” and resources. The Quinn Group disputed the authenticity of the memorandum and sued for libel; the paper defended the memorandum and pleaded justification (in effect, that allegations were true), or alternatively that the disclosures were in the public interest and thus protected by qualified privilege.…