Chicago Tribune: Saudi former BCCI director sues American author Rachel Ehrenfeld using British libel law for writing that he financed Osama bin Laden. Suit demands destruction of all unsold copies of her books. Book was not released in UK but a dozen readers there purchased it through the Internet. (Plaintiff KbM is rather notorious among investigative journalists for this sort of action, and he has all the money in the world to fund armies of lawyers to engage in this sort of "libel tourism" as Ehrenfeld calls it. Nevertheless, and seriously, it's hard to understand why if and until Britain changes its libel laws, publishers and their armies of lawyers don't protect themselves by indicating their products with any sort of by-UK-standards-judged 'libelous' information cannot be sold or shipped to or downloaded in the UK. If people in the U.K. don't want the information by serious authors about who is allegedly funding al Qaeda for instance, they can accept having laws which prevent them from seeing it. But why should the rest of us be the victims of that sort of de facto censorship due to another government?)

Posted by Laura at March 18, 2008 07:29 AM