cearta.ie – Page 97 – the Irish for rights

Some stuff I’ve come across online recently has reminded me of the New York indie rock band, Vampire Weekend, not only the high-profile controversy over the “frustrating” lawsuit against them by a model who claims that they did not have her permission to use an image of her on their “Contra” album cover, but also the lyrics of their 2008 single “Oxford Comma” (pictured left; see background | lyrics | music | YouTube). The Oxford comma is an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list; in the song, it’s a metaphor for unnecessary pretention in interpersonal relationships; and in its grammatical meaning it has recently been the focus of discussion by pedants, geeks, and drafters.…

The Press Council of Ireland: appointments and review

29 July, 201010 December, 2012

| 4 Comments

| Press Council

Recent press releases from the Press Council of Ireland have announced two key appointments. Retired diplomat Daithi O’Ceallaigh has been appointed as Chairman of the Press Council from 1 August, succeeding Prof Tom Mitchell (Irish Independent | Irish Times); and retired academic Prof John Horgan has been appointed to a second term as Press Ombudsman from 1 September (Irish Times). Both appointments are for three years. Following the recent recognition of the Press Council for the purposes of Schedule 2 to the Defamation Act, 2009, these appointments are set fair solidify the position of the Ombudsman and the Council in their work to safeguard and promote professional and ethical standards in Irish newspapers and periodicals. The time my therefore be ripe for some hard questions.

The UK’s sister organisation to the Press Council, the Press Complaints Commission, has recently completed a thorough and independent review of its governance. The report published earlier this month (pdf) recommended that there should be:

• A clearer role for the Commission;
• Tougher scrutiny rules;
• More industry engagement with the Commission;
• A stronger Board;
• A stronger lay voice on the content of the Editors’ Code of Practice;
• Greater transparency about appointments;
• Greater openness about the system; and
• More rigorous examination of performance.

…

Freedom of expression, the ECHR, and Turkey: recent developments

28 July, 201012 January, 2011

| 4 Comments

| Academic Freedom, ECHR, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, Sedition

Two recent cases in the European Court of Human Rights demonstrate that there are still large gaps in the protection of freedom of expression in Turkey.

Terrorist speech
In Gözel and Özer v Turkey (43453/04 and 31098/05; 6 July 2010 | judgment (in French); press release (in English)), a Turkish magazine published an article that contained a statement by the central committee of the banned Marxist-Leninist/Turkish Communist Party. Another published an article about the founder of the Marxist movement in Turkey which included a statement by eight people who were in custody for belonging to illegal organisations. The editors of both magazines were convicted of pubishing statements of illegal armed organisations.

The ECHR noted that the editors had been convicted for publishing texts that the domestic courts had characterised as “terrorist organisation statements” without taking into account their context or content, and held that to condemn a text simply on the basis of the identity of the author would entail the automatic exclusion of groups of individuals from the protection afforded by Article 10. It therefore concluded that since the opinions expressed did not constitute hate speech or stir up violence, the Respondent was not entitled to rely on national security to restrict the public’s right to receive information, and that Article 10 had therefore been breached.…

A structure for comparative analysis of Freedom of Expression

27 July, 201027 July, 2010

| 2 Comments

| Freedom of Expression, Legal Theory

Prof Adrienne Stone (pictured left), Director of Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies in the Melbourne Law School has just made a very interesting article available on SSRN. It is The Comparative Constitutional Law of Freedom of Expression, forthcming as a chapter is in Rosalind Dixon and Tom Ginsburg (eds) Research Handbook in Comparative Constitutional Law (Edward Elgar, forthcoming, 2011). Stone argues:

Freedom of expression is among the most widely protected of constitutional rights. Rights of freedom of expression can be found in constitutions drawn from all continents. … Even in those few democracies without comprehensive constitutional protection of rights, freedom of expression finds constitutional protection in other ways. It can plausibly be argued that parliamentary systems … – even in the era before the adoption of charters of rights – recognized a constitutional principle of freedom of expression that, though not enforceable by judicial review, was understood as a fundamental value that informed the reading of statutes and the common law. In addition, there are some legal systems that recognize a judicially enforceable principle of freedom of expression despite the absence of a written constitutional right.

… some scholars … question whether … the comparing free speech principles across constitutional systems is practical or useful for courts interpreting or applying constitutional principles of freedom of expression … The complexity of (and disagreement about) underlying philosophical commitments, the opacity of judicial decision making, and cultural specificity of any particular body of law, … [are] formidable problems for the comparativists, … and the] case for comparativism may be weaker in relation to constitutional principles have developed their own rich set of resources and a distinctive conception of freedom of expression.

…

Fáilte, IJLS!

13 July, 2010

| 1 Comment

| General, Irish Law, Legal Journals and Law Reviews

As prefigured here a little while ago, there is a new peer-reviewed Irish legal journal, the Irish Journal of Legal Studies. The publication of Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010 has just been announced on the journal’s homepage, and the contents of the first issue are as follows:

Sexual Violence: Witnesses and Suspects, a Debating Document by Mr Justice Peter Charleton and Stephen Byrne. From the abstract:

This article explores the rules of evidence and criminal procedure as they apply in sexual offence cases, in the context of recent empirical accounts of attrition rates in sexual offences, and having regard to the rights of the accused and the need to maintain a fair balance that limits the potential for injustice.

The Constitution and the Protestant Schools cuts Controversy: Seeing the Wood for the Trees by Eoin Daly. From the abstract:

This article argues that special financial arrangements for Protestant secondary schools, recently controversially withdrawan, constituted a species of constitutionally permissible, if not constitutionally required, accommodation of religion. This controversy also serves as a prism through which to view the broader limitations of the constitutional framework for the guarantee of religious freedom in the education context.

Managerialism in Irish Universities by Professor Steve Hedley.…

Financial Services Supervision in the EU after the Financial Crisis

12 July, 201027 July, 2010

| No Comments

| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops

The School of Law, Trinity College Dublin is delighted to present a public lecture entitled

Financial Services Supervision in the EU after the Financial Crisis: The Proposed Role of the European Securities and Markets Authority

by Professor Reyes Palá, Professor of Commercial Law, University of Zaragoza and former deputy Director of the Spanish Securities Exchange Commission (CNMV).

The lecture will take place at 6:00pm next Thursday, 15 July 2010, in the School of Law, TCD (map here), and all are welcome.

Abstract

In the 1980s, the European Community established the pillars of the financial services single market (specially mutual recognition of prospectuses in cases of IPOs and admission to listing, UCITs and a basic financial services legal framework). But the regulation was incomplete, fragmentary and didn’t achieve the freedom of financial services across Europe. At the beginning of the 21st century the Commission promoted an ambitious programme, endorsed by the Council and the Parliament, in the financial services area.…

Is Apollinaire obscene? The ECHR says: no!

7 July, 201028 April, 2020

| 5 Comments

| Censorship, ECHR, Freedom of Expression, James Joyce, Obscenity

When I was growing up, I read a children’s book called The Arabian Nights, an innocent version of the Islamic classic One Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps surprisingly, a group of Egyptian lawyers has recently called for a ban of a newly-released version of the Nights, on the grounds that it is “obscene” and could lead people to “vice and sin”. At the same time, another Egyptian group has called for a ban on the controversial novel Azazeel (Beelzebub) by Youssef Ziedan, which won the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. And, irony of ironies, just in time for Bloomsday, a manga comic book version of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had almost been banned from the Apple App Store for obscene images, but Apple then relented, and reversed its earlier decision to remove panels containing nude images, though it still continues to reject less famous apps.

These examples of censorship of literature on the grounds of obscenity are simply the latest instances of a long and dishonourable tradition. In an earlier post, I considered whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is obscene. In Akdas v Turkey 41056/04 (15 February 2010) (judgment in French; press release in English), the European Court of Human Rights was faced with a similar question earlier this year, when it had to consider whether a Turkish ban on Guillaume Apollinaire‘s Les Onze Mille Verges (or, The Eleven Thousand Rods) was consistent with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.…

Unjust Enrichment and Public Law

6 July, 201012 August, 2016

| No Comments

| Restitution

I’ve just received news of the publication of the eagerly-awaited:

Unjust Enrichment and Public Law. A Comparative Study of England, France and the EU

by Rebecca Williams

This book examines claims involving unjust enrichment and public bodies in France, England and the EU. Part 1 explores the law as it now stands in England and Wales as a result of cases such as Woolwich v IRC [1993] AC 70 (HL) (pdf), those resulting from the decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Case C-410/98 Metallgesellschaft and Hoechst v IRC [2001] ECR I–4727, [2001] EUECJ C-410/98, [2001] Ch 620 (8 March 2001) and those involving Local Authority swaps transactions. So far these cases have been viewed from either a public or a private law perspective, whereas in fact both branches of the law are relevant, and the author argues that the courts ought not to lose sight of the public law issues when a claim is brought under the private law of unjust enrichment, or vice versa. In order to achieve this a hybrid approach is outlined which would allow the law access to both the public and private law aspects of such cases.

Since there has been much discussion, particularly in the context of public body cases, of the relationship between the common law and civilian approaches to unjust enrichment, or enrichment without cause, Part 2 considers the French approach in order to ascertain what lessons it holds for England and Wales.

…